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UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY
Utah Valley University Library
George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections
Oral History Program
Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories
Directed by Michele Welch
Interview with Linda Makin
by
Kimberly Williamson
March 23, 2012
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Linda Makin
Interviewer: Kimberly Williamson
Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 23 March 2012
Recordist: Catherine McIntyre
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Kimberly Williamson
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: LM = Linda Makin (Interviewee)
KW = Kimberly Williamson (Interviewer)
Brief Description of Contents:
Linda Makin talks about growing up in Lehi, Utah, attending Utah Technical College at Provo (UTC) and the path that eventually led her to become Utah Valley University’s Chief Planning Budget & Policy officer. She describes meeting her husband, Mike Makin and how they raised their two daughters with them both working full-time and attending college. She also shares the heartbreak of fertility issues causing her to not have the large family she desires. She leaves advice for Utah women to find good mentors, don’t underestimate the good you can do, as well as recognizing your own personal worth. She speaks openly about discrimination issues, being true to herself, and other lessons she has learned along the way. Since the interview, in June 2013 Makin was appointed by UVU Pres. Matthew Holland as the Vice President for Planning, Budget and Human Resources at Utah Valley University. This division includes the offices of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning, Budget, Institutional Research and Information, Human Resources, and Policy.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 2
Audio Transcription
[01:28]
Beginning of interview
KW: My name is Kimberly Williamson. Today is Friday, March 23, 2012, and I’m at the George Sutherland Archives in the Utah Valley University library. Today I’m interviewing Linda Makin for my senior project and with your approval in the Utah Women’s Walk. Today we are going to talk about her life and the many contributions she has made at Utah Valley University during her years of service.
I just want to thank you and for agreeing to this. You came from a large family in Lehi, Utah.
LM: Yes, I did.
KW: Do you want to tell us about your family structure and where you fit into your family.
LM: I’m the fifth of six children. There were two daughters, then two sons, and then two more daughters. I’m the fifth of six—a mother and father who were happily married over—I’m trying to remember—they were approaching their sixtieth wedding anniversary when my father passed away. Grew up small town, lived in the same house my whole life on the same street until I got married and moved out of the house.
KW: Do you have a lot of family heritage there in Lehi?
LM: No, my mother was from Beaver, Utah. She was born and raised there. My father was born and raised in Paragonah, Utah, so they’re both southern Utah, sort of southern central Utah. They met during World War II. She was still in high school. She got married to my dad before she graduated high school. He is six years older than her. They moved on to the family farm and after a while she said, “This is not what I want to do. You’ve got to get me out of here.” They moved north, he took a variety of jobs, and he finally settled on a position at the Dugway Proving Grounds, which is out in western Utah sort of out in the middle of nowhere and he thankfully didn’t make us move to Dugway, but we moved to Lehi. He made a very long daily commute until he retired. He was there I think over thirty years. We were grateful not to have to live in Dugway in that environment; we were happy to live in a neighborhood that was stable.
KW: Your father’s family, they were farmers and your mother’s family?
LM: Um, I don’t know what her father did. They probably did farming. I know that her mother, my grandmother, did nursing and midwifing, you know, back in the early 1900s, helping others out taking in laundry and things like that to help make ends meet. My mother grew up very poor.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 3
KW: Wow. Where there any women in your life that you admired growing up?
LM: My mother and my grandmother because they were of course the maternal people that I saw. My grandmother suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for many years. I never remember her without a cane and her without knees bowed out. She literally suffered for many, many years. She was widowed for seventeen years. She and I were very close. I loved my relationship with my grandmother because she as grandmothers do let you do and try things that mothers tend not to have time for. She would let me walk to the store that was a few blocks away when I was seven or eight and go buy whatever we needed to make lunch with, then put me up to the stove and let me stir and help cook. She had an old pump organ in a back room of her house. I taught myself to play on that organ. She was so proud of that. She just gave me opportunities that I loved to explore my talents those kinds of things. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She kept a very clean house, very orderly, took good care of things. That is how we survived when we didn’t have much. Beyond that, teachers, the female teachers that I had in elementary school were very kind to me. They taught me a lot of things. My next-door neighbor was the lunch lady at the elementary school. To me those were about the only type of jobs that women were having was the lunch lady and a teacher.
KW: Were you aware of your grandmother’s participation in being a midwife, nurse type thing?
LM: I did, but it was more she did odd jobs. It wasn’t something—I don’t think they did it because it was a high profile position in the community. It was more that was what poor folk did to help the rich folk so I was aware of what she did that way.
KW: The one grandmother you were close with, did she stay in southern Utah or did she move up?
LM: After my parents moved up, they moved up to American Fork. My grandfather began to work for Tooele Army Depot. That was the most stable job I think that he had in his life, was once he started working for the government.
KW: Were there any incidences in your childhood that you can think of that led you to your life’s work that you’re doing right now?
LM: I don’t know what led me exactly to my life’s work. I think about what may have led me to even this industry or whatever. In elementary school, I would walk or ride my bike to Lehi library all summer long. I did the reading programs and the story times. I always had books checked out in the library. I loved going to the library. I think her name was— oh, I can’t remember now. I remember her, and remember sitting at the desk and just having that welcoming environment where you can learn. You can come here to learn and have a bigger world. I remember reading Helen Keller’s story over and over again and those sorts of things of women overcoming challenges [and] the educational environment. The other thing I would say was my initial career was secretarial, and my dad was a ward Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 4
clerk for the LDS Church for it felt like forever when I was a young person.1 In fact, in
my office today, I still have the typewriter. It’s an old heavy iron typewriter; it’s in my
office now because back in those days, they didn’t have the clerk offices. They had the
bishop office, but no clerk office.2 He would do the clerking at home. I remember the
carbon paper, the onionskin paper, and the typewriter ribbons, and the clack, clack of the
typewriter late into the night as he did his clerk work. I knew that he was exact, and I
knew that he took pride in doing his work right. I sort of saw that so maybe it was a blend
of those two things of an office and educational learning environment.
KW: Were you good in math when you were in school? Was it a subject that you really liked?
LM: I was good at it; I didn’t love it. Back in the seventies when I was in high school, the
nerdy girls did math. I didn’t want to be the nerdy girl. I took a dare from my algebra
teacher in high school who dared me to take geometry, and I didn’t want to take
geometry. I’m really not spatially orientated and that’s what I thought geometry— how
big’s this room? I have no idea. He dared me and I talked a few of my friends into it. He
tolerated us in his geometry class, and I did very well in geometry. I did it on a dare. I
didn’t do it because I just loved math. Accounting was taught at our high school. Again,
the boys did that. In fact, I don’t know if the girls took accounting. To me I thought well
that is a nerdy thing, I don’t want to take accounting. I did office procedure and shorthand
and typing. I took all sorts of awards for shorthand and typing and office procedure. Back
when I was in high school, I was the business Sterling Scholar. I thought my path was
secretary or maybe teaching business, but I really thought secretary.
KW: That is what your first associate’s degree was in—
LM: It was—
KW: —secretarial, okay. You graduated third.
LW: I graduated third in my class in high school.
KW: Did you feel smart? Did you know that is where you ranked?
LM: I knew that I was bright. I knew I was smart. I knew that I was third in my class, but
again I didn’t want to be nerdy. I can’t be nerdy. The girl who was first was very, very
smart, a very kind person, but nerdy. She didn’t do drama, drill team, band, and all those
things. That’s what I wanted to do too. I wanted this more full experience. To me
somehow I thought only focusing on my education would have been a nerdy thing to do.
1. The formal name of the LDS Church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints.
2. A bishop is the ecclesiastical leader of a Latter-day Saint congregation or ward. A
ward is the basic ecclesiastical unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 5
I knew I was bright. I did advanced English, but I didn’t take the AP test because I thought I don’t need that when I’m going to secretarial school. I don’t need AP English. I will take AP English, but I won’t go and take the test, and that was dumb. I was smart and dumb at the same moment.
KW: I can understand—
LM: (laughs)
KW: We learn along the way; that is all I can say. When you came to Utah Technical College as a student, it was during the period where women were just beginning to merge into nontraditional roles. Can you tell me what your thoughts were? Did you think about that? I know that you came here and did secretarial school, but did you start thinking, Hey there might be something else?
LM: Yes, beyond the secretarial, you are in the business school. You realize there are women in accounting, really. There are women in business management. At the time, we also had a program called fashion merchandising. The cute girls were in fashion merchandising. I had no desire to go do that. At the time, we had places for women. They could be in business. They could be in accounting. They could be in secretarial. It was primarily women that were in secretarial and fashion merchandising back then. But there were some in business management and accounting. I made friends with several that were in accounting and I thought, Oh that’s not too bad. I could see a woman in that role. Still in some of the auto trades and on the Orem campus that is all there was there. You still saw mostly men in those other industrial fields.
But it was female faculty who mentored me: who saw in me potential, who encouraged me to come, who encouraged me to work for an attorney while I was in school, to stop working at the grocery store, and start building your résumé, and see what is out there. When I got my first secretarial job here, it was for a female dean. That was very unheard of. I still remember meeting Archie Alexander; he was the director of warehouse back then. First time I met him and I told him whom I worked for he said, “That Lucille Stoddard, she’s going to be president someday.” I thought, Huh. She had gained a lot of respect on campus.
KW: Did she help mentor you because I interviewed her, and I know she mentored a lot of women along the way?
LM: I’m going to put in a cough drop. Sorry about that. We’ll get my throat to stop tickling.
Lucille was a great mentor. Lucille had just gone through a divorce. She had two young daughters, and she had a son who was older, Sam. We became friends. I helped him type some of his thesis, but the two little girls, particularly her youngest—she was about five when I started working for Lucille—I just adored Nancy. She would come to my desk, “Can I have a quarter so I can go to the machines.” I loved that. I could see how Lucille was blending family and work. She was a well-respected leader. I don’t know if she Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 6
considered herself a feminist; she might have considered herself a feminist. She was fair to everyone. From that, I took even if you are a feminist you don’t have to be anti-man. She was really fair to everyone. She encouraged me. She always told me, “You can do so much more than this.” She still is a mentor to me. She still will encourage me, strengthen me, sends me notes of confidence and thank you. That’s one of the things I learned from Lucille was note writing. I didn’t know that very well. She would see things about people and write a note to them. I would send them off for her. I thought, You know, she knows how to recognize others. She was a great mentor.
[15:13]
KW: Yes, a great woman. Let’s go back a little bit; so you came here to do your associates and then you met your husband here. How far into your program, did you meet him?
LM: Okay, let’s back up. I came to do my associate’s. I did that in five semesters. I did that with encouragement of Barbra Hoge who I just adored, adored.
KW: What was her role here?
LM: She was a faculty member in business. She was also the advisor for Phi Beta Lambda, which I became involved in. She could see that I was a little bit assertive, aggressive. She gave me a book The Assertive Woman when it came out and wrote inside of it, “I don’t think you really need this.” That helped me understand a little bit about myself. So Barbra and I—I still consider her the person who really started me seeing that there is more than just what you have seen in your life. There’s more you can do and I’m encouraging you to do more.
Meeting my husband—I actually met my husband the July after I had graduated high school before I started at Utah Technical College in Provo. I’m older than him. He was about to become a senior at American Fork High School. We met; we were both working at Ream’s Grocery Store. I was a checker; he was a bagger, yeah. He was cute; I could make him blush; it was fun. (laughs) We met there. He had never really considered college. He was a Future Farmer of America; he was a state Future Farmer of America. He saw his life in farming. I wanted nothing to do with farming. I worked on my degree. I went to work for an attorney; he got job changes. We got engaged the next October. I was nearly done with my associates of applied sciences degree. He had just started a machinist program here at UTC Provo. We got married; I supported him through that degree. We had our first child. He got a job. We thought everything was going to be just as you had planned in life. Then the economy took a turn for the worst. He lost his job and couldn’t find another one. I came looking for another job. I came looking for a job. My job at UTC Provo opened again. The person who had taken my place hated it, and I stepped back into my same seat. That is amazing.
KW: Let’s go back and let’s do some dates. When were you born?
LM: 1960, August of 1960.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 7
KW: We are the same age—
LM: Oh, good.
KW: I’m actually older than you are. You graduated in ’78—
LM: Graduated in 1978.
KW: When did you and your husband marry?
LM: I met my husband July of ’78, and we married March of 1980. I was nineteen; he was eighteen when we got married. People thought we were crazy. People told us it will never last, Do you know the statistics on young marriages? We weathered some really tough times economically. That caused him some depression—and putting him through school the first time and then a second time because he decided he didn’t like shift work and he didn’t like blue-collar work. He essentially started over, and ten years after we were married, he graduated with his bachelor’s degree.
KW: That’s wonderful. After you had your first child, you then decided that you were going to be a stay-at-home mom.
LM: Yes.
KW: But then because of the economy you had to find work again. But then there was a mind change for you somewhere.
LM: Found work, um, watched him struggle with the depression and his lack of ability to find a job. I determined for myself that security was really important to me. Financial security mattered to me. That was going to be a fundamental driver for me. I needed to know that we could make rent and that we could have food on the table, that we could keep cars running. I didn’t set out to make a lot of money, just set out to have safety and stability economically. That’s really why I went back to work. I had done home sewing. I tried to do something where I would be at home, and it just didn’t work.
KW: You have your associate’s and then you did another associate.
LM: I have an associate’s of applied science, which did not require a lot of general education.
It was the hands on secretarial things: taking shorthand, typing, office procedures, business accounting. When I decided to go back to school—which I should back up on that—I could take classes free at UVU, UTC, UVSC.3 There were those with whom I
3. Linda refers to the many name changes of Utah Valley University. Utah Valley University began as Central Utah Vocational School (CUVS) in 1941. Twenty-two years later, the school’s name was changed to Utah Trade Technical Institute. In 1967, the name was again changed to Utah Technical College at Provo (UTC). During the next twenty years, Utah Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 8
worked with or for who would say, You don’t need a class. You’re smart enough; you can figure this out. It took me awhile to figure out that was their way of keeping me in my role. That is what it felt like because if I had credits, if I had credentials, I could move. I was mobile. I finally recognized that and I said, “This is ridiculous. I know I can learn it on my own, but I’m getting nothing for my résumé, and I’m not advancing to anywhere. I’m going to start taking these classes. Even though I know, I know some of these things, I need the credits. I need the certificate, the degree.” I decided to do that and I think I had taken a few classes here and there that interested me. Then decided when my oldest daughter started junior high I needed to be able to help her with math. I started my math sequence, and I thought I’m going to get through my math sequence and then we will see where I go from there. Once I get my math sequence, I continued to take my general education. [I] completed my associate’s of science degree long before I ever submitted to graduate. I had a colleague here that said, “Linda, you know, they are changing the requirements for the associate’s of science degree. If you don’t apply by this date, you are going to take more classes.” I went in, applied, got my associate’s of science degree. Still didn’t know which four-year degree I wanted. We didn’t have many back then.
KW: Right.
LM: Business management was sort of the one I started on, but it wasn’t what I felt good about. I just kept taking classes that would count for whatever degree. Got to a point— and we had accounting by now—and I said that’s really the coursework I would rather take. I went after an accounting degree and not a business management degree.
KW: Did you enjoy those classes in accounting?
LM: I loved my accounting classes, yes. To me that’s math, but it’s applied math. That is one thing I know about myself is I like applied learning more than I like studying theories.
KW: That makes sense to me. There was a man—Cameron Martin.
LM: Yes.
KW: He encouraged you to get your master’s.
LM: He did, so when I got my bachelor’s degree, Cameron was a colleague of mine, and he said, “So when are you going to get your master’s.” I said, “Cameron I can’t even talk to you about that right now. I’m so sick of school I will throw-up.” It was physical, if I have to do anything more. He said, “Okay, I appreciate that, but when are you going to do it.” I said, “Talk to me—the soonest I will do it is in a year and a half from now, so fall of
Technical began offering associate’s degrees, and its name was changed in 1987 to Utah Valley Community College to reflect its expansion. In 1993, the school began offering bachelor’s degrees and became Utah Valley State College (UVSC). In 2008, the school added master’s degrees, and changed its name a final time, to that of Utah Valley University (UVU).Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 9
2003 was the earliest I would ever consider it.” He came to me during the early winter of 2003 and said, “Hey, we need to get you a master’s program. Here are some ones I can recommend. The deadlines are coming up. I will write you a letter of recommendation. Get your stuff in.” I did and was accepted in the master’s program at BYU [Brigham Young University]—the MPA program—and over the course of three years completed that degree.
KW: Did he suggest that you go into that program?
LM: Yes, it’s a program that he had been in. He recommended it. He knew me and knew that program well enough to say, “I think this is a nice match for you.”
KW: Do you think that he foresaw the direction that you needed to go?
LM: He knew and I think from the interview in the magazine, he knew that in order to be credible, I needed a master’s degree at a minimum.4 (laughs)
KW: That particular degree because it’s a multi—
LM: A multi-faceted public administration. It gave me broad background, and he knew I already had a lot of background in that. He knew something that I could balance with work, home, and school additionally. It was a MPA program that met every Tuesday night for three years. I was in Salt Lake until ten o’clock at night and one night to do group work with other people who were working in higher education essentially.
KW: So throughout when you were getting your master’s degree, you obviously were a wife and a mother—
LM: Yes, uh-huh.
KW: —were you working full-time?
LM: Yes, full-time.
KW: Oh my gosh.
LM: Same with my bachelor’s degree. I worked full-time throughout that whole thing. That’s actually when I developed the bad habit of working late because I would do online classes. Some of them would be online. I tried to mix an online or TV class and a regular class. I would go to a class as much as possible during lunch hour or in the evening and I did quite a few evenings. I would do distance ed. or TV. I could concentrate more if I stayed an extra hour in the office and did the Internet class in my office. Then when I
4. Linda refers to “Makin Strides,” a magazine article in UVU Alumni Magazine. See Plothow, Brad. “Makin Strides: How One Alumna and her Alma Mater Rose to Influence Together.” UVU Alumni Magazine 3, no. 3 (2012): 20–25.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 10
went home and had to face the kids, the laundry, and everything else that was there.
KW: Right, this brings us to—let’s start talking about Second Wave Feminism. You were going through this. Like you said you’re juggling career and motherhood. Many women who worked had to come home and had to take on what they call the second shift of doing laundry cooking and cleaning. How did you balance that? Were you expected to do that or did your husband participate?
LM: I think in our life and I don’t know how this mirrors the Second Wave, but it probably does. Initially when my husband—so after he was unemployed and I was working again, he determined, “I do not want to be doing this kind of labor the rest of my life.” He started back to school. He would work part-time jobs, and he would go to school at night or he would go to school during the day and work part-time jobs at night. He doesn’t like the term, Mr. Mom. He hated the movie, Mr. Mom, but he was Mr. Mom. He just didn’t want to associate himself with that. He would get the kids from after school or pick them up from the sitters after school. He’d help get them fed; he would do whatever. He did that for a while. Then there was a point in our lives when he would leave for school at Weber State and we were living in American Fork. He would drive to Weber State, which is a 170 miles a day. He would leave home at six something in the morning; he would go to school. I would get the kids to school. He would come home; he would pick the kids up from the sitter. He would spend two hours with them. I’d come in the house at about five-fifteen. He would have made himself some sort of a dinner at that point. Essentially, he was self-supporting his daily needs, taking care of the kids, snack, homework, whatever. I’d come in the door, kiss him; he would leave. He would go to work until ten o’clock at night; then he’d come home. I’d give him a snack again because it would have been a long day, and then we would go to bed and then we’d repeat. We did that for two and a half years so he could get his bachelor’s degree. There were sacrifices on all of our parts during those times.
Once he’d completed his degree, and he’d gone back to work, then it was more—I think then we settled into now what are all the roles because before we were really just sharing these roles. Now we’re settling into this; he’s still got a commute. He’s working in Bountiful so he still has a huge commute. We made a conscious decision that I was going to continue working at that point. People would say, Now that he is out of school so are you going to quit working. I would think, Now that he is done with school, he is going to make the same amount that I’m making now—it was like 27,000 dollars. Why would I quit? We live like this. We don’t have cars that run. I didn’t sacrifice for ten years so we could continue to live like this. I’m not quitting work.
We decided we are going to stay put. We had the support system around us for myself and for the kids. We had good daycare. We had a good school. We had great carpooling arrangements. Why mess with that? He would just drive. So for a couple of years he drove up there and then got laid off again. He still has maintained the decision that we made back then. So we live within ten miles of my work. So he drives and has driven for twenty years up to an employer just by the Salt Lake airport. He makes the sacrifice of the commute because when we were raising the kids it was more important that I be Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 11
available. That was the role that I wanted to have. We made that decision.
Okay so now back to how we shared the workload. His commute complicated the workload. He’s always been an involved father—still is. After an hour in the car, you are pretty much zoned and done when you get home. I did do dinners. We still grocery shop together. He would still go to the store and do those sorts of things, which my dad didn’t ever do. He has done laundry. He does not like to clean the house; that is not his favorite thing. Although when he did have breaks, he would clean closets—not the way I would do—and that would cause tension. (laughs) I would say, “Why did you clean it like that.” I did carry most of the household responsibilities and for the kids. He would help with homework. He went to events. He was supportive. Back then, he would do all the yard work. He was expected to mow the lawn and do those sorts of things. What I found was my dad never let me do that as a kid—once I mowed the lawn, I found that I liked it. I liked being outside. I liked that exercise. Then it became a problem because now I liked something that was work. Then I started owning it more than I wanted. Then I had to say, “No, I know I like this, but you have to do this because you’re not liking dishes.” (laughs) There were those kinds of tradeoffs.
[30:53]
KW: With two parents working and going to school, how did that impact your kids? Were they raised appreciating an education?
LM: My oldest daughter, I think has some resentment—if this ever gets released we might have to cut this part—about me working. Early in her young womanhood, she determined she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I support that. I think stay-at-home moms are great if they can do it. Awesome, do it. She wants to do that. That is what she does now. She is a stay-at-home mom for the most part. She likes that. She’s committed in her soul to that. I mean it’s very deep. I think for her it was challenging that I worked. She was expected to have more responsibility than maybe she wanted. I don’t know; we’d have to interview her and see how she felt about that. She has a very strong commitment to being a stay-at-home mom.
KW: Did she go to college?
LM: She came to UVU, UVSC for a year at sort of my insistence, “You are going to go to college; you might as well go over there and get free tuition. You can keep working” and doing what she wanted. She met her husband here in the first semester. They were married in the second semester. She was married at age eighteen. He was twenty-two, but she was eighteen. She quit school. She would love to go back to school, but she would love to go into culinary arts. I think it is the hands on stuff that she wants to do. Again I think it’s not so much she didn’t want to go to college, but sort of my thing was go to college, get a liberal education, get an understanding. I don’t care what you major in or whatever. But she didn’t know all the opportunities for maybe some of the hands on stuff that really is more interesting to her. Creating things is what really interests her. She would like to. The offer is still there. We supported our youngest daughter through Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 12
college, and the offer still stands for her if she wants to go to college. We will help her go to school like we helped the youngest one go to school.
Our younger daughter is more of an independent soul before she was probably old enough to have been doing this by most people’s standards. The neighbor next door did daycare. Her daughter and my daughter were best friends; they still are very good friends. She could check in with Tammy after school, and they’d come to my house and have fun. Because Kassidy didn’t want to be home with all the daycare kids and Emily sort of likes her space, the two of them would have a great time. Tammy was just next door. They did that after school. In the summer, I still had to have a sitter there for them for quite a while. She’s very independent. She likes to cook, clean, do laundry, shop, and organize. She really at some point just said, “Mom, I don’t need a sitter anymore. I can do this. I’m doing this already.” She took concurrent enrollment in high school. Took some summer classes here, finished her bachelor’s degree in three years at BYU, took a year off, worked for a year full-time, and then completed law school last April as an attorney.
KW: How many children did you have?
LM: Two daughters.
KW: Oh, just two girls. That’s interesting that you have one daughter who’s one way and—
LM: They are absolutely very different.
KW: Yes, I have three daughters, and they are very different. During Second Wave Feminism, there were issues of wage discrimination, family planning, and childcare. Did any of those affect you? You were a student here during that time, but you also were working here.
LM: Childcare was hard, especially, initially with the first one. This was 1981 when she was born; it would have been around ’82 or ’83 when I was really struggling with childcare. For a while my mom helped watch, and my dad’s health got bad, and it became too much of a burden. Luckily, UTC Provo at the time offered a childcare center. I put Mandy in childcare here during the academic year. They didn’t offer it during the summer so I’d scramble for summer assistance. Institutionalized daycare wasn’t accepted very well back then. People sort of thought—
KW: Do you think it was here in Utah Valley? Is that what you are saying?
LM: I think it has changed; it is more acceptable to take your kid to KinderCare to Mountainlands Head Start—those sorts of things, but they were pretty rare back then. You mostly had to find a neighbor, friend, family to help you out. Again, we tried to find family as much as we could. Sometimes that worked well; sometimes that didn’t work well at all, especially by the time I had my second one. I had an infant that needed to be taken care of. I was home for the first year of Mandy’s life but with Emily, I was back at work in six or eight weeks. That was more challenging. Mike could be home part of the Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 13
time with her and with Mandy, but now I had to find someone to tend a little young one. His sister helped for a while. It was not the ideal situation; the care wasn’t what I was hoping to have. I found neighbors who wanted to be stay-at-home moms, but needed to supplement their income. They had the sort of values and exposure to the world that I was looking for. Didn’t take a lot; they just took my kids. They had kids about the same age, and it was great. It just worked out wonderfully, and that really helped me out especially when they were very young. Even as they grew, again we had neighbors that would take them after school and that helped out a lot as well. I do think it was hard for women. I was very lucky that we had daycare here at UVU and particularly with my youngest. It worked so well. It challenged her so much, which was good.
Wage discrepancy has multiple causes. One is bias that does exist. I still can remember a couple of opportunities even with people that I respected a lot who I thought would never say words like this, but did. Who would say, “I think so and so needs a raise because you know he’s trying to raise a family.” I would just be stunned thinking, what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to raise a family too. I have bills I’m trying to pay. I don’t work here because I’m trying to get out of the house. I’m working here to support a family too. Those things just cut me. I would think, Are you kidding me, or the man that would walk around who would say, “I cannot do this or I cannot do that.” I’m thinking, You have a wife she can get a job. This wife got a job. You can have those things. You can make different choices. If that is what you are going to whine about there is something you can do about it, so stop whining about it (laughs) so those sorts of things.
I never felt, as though there was intentional, mindful discrimination. It was that unconscious, Well he’s is trying to raise a family. He has six kids and a wife. He has a house payment to make. I’m thinking, what have I got? Hi, I’m a human being too, and we have the same issues. The other cause of wage discrepancy and I’m a guilty poster child is women will take on [additional] responsibilities without money. I did that through my career until the fall of 2008. That’s not that long ago. That is the first time I took on more responsibilities, got the title at the same time, and actually got the money at the same time.
Most of my promotions at the university did not work that way. When I first moved to the budget office, I was moved out of academic affairs with my boss of twenty-one years. We worked together for twenty-one years—
[40:26]
KW: Was that Lucille Stoddard?
LM: No, it was Doug Warner. He was my boss for twenty-one years. Lucille was my boss for a very short time, but is still my mentor and friend forever. He [Doug Warner] became director of budgets. Then it was a question of do I follow him to budgets or do I stay in academic affairs, which Lucille was over. The decision was made that I would follow him with budgets, but I would not get a pay increase, but he person who was going to move from that slot into academic affairs would, and I should just be okay with that, Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 14
which I was. Even being an assertive woman, somehow when it came to that, I just didn’t push it. As I advanced and had more and more responsibilities, I would tend to get a title and then maybe a year later I would get the raise. I got a title and a raise, more responsibilities, title, raise.
Bill [William] Sederburg when he became president, there were six vice-presidents then. He leaned his organization down to four. My boss Doug Warner was a vice-president. He was changed to an associate vice-president. I thought, Okay, I’m going to get pushed down the organization a little bit more because Doug reported to a vice-president reporting to the president. And I’d be reporting to the associate vice-president reporting to the vice-president reporting to the president. Okay we will see if I stay. That was sort of my attitude. We’ll see if I stay. (laughs) But within a couple of hours Bill Sederburg had called me in his office and said, “I want to pull budget out from under that, and I want you reporting directly to me.” Now I have a new title, I’m reporting directly to the president, and I’m told that I cannot give you any money. I said, “Okay.” And a year later he says, “All right find out what other people in positions like this get paid and give me a proposal on your salary.” I researched it and took him in the number and he said,” Okay but we’ll do it over two years.” I said, “Okay” even though I had all ready done it for a year. Is this his fault, no, not completely. It’s my fault because I didn’t say, “You know what? That is not the way I think it works.”
(The lights turn off, and there is discussion about that)
So I did that. In that particular situation, we had a HR director who was a woman who was a dear friend and colleague still to this day. We had our biggest argument we ever had because she didn’t feel like I should get that raise. It was phenomenal to me. It was a year later half at a time—so basically it took three years to get fully paid for what I was doing. I had to argue with a woman about this.
KW: There were a lot of women here at that time that were in leadership positions. Did you find that women were not supporting each other—that they were almost tearing each other down?
LM: Yes, and not only tearing each other down, tearing down the men. Somehow, to some extent in order for women to get ahead, we all had to tear down someone else. You asked about the axioms in one of your questions you had on the paper you sent me. One of the things I’ve used is “I lift thee and thee lift me and together we’ll ascend.” It’s an old Quaker proverb. The idea of climbing over top of people to get somewhere just doesn’t work because all you do is leave dead bodies behind or walking wounded. That is never healthy for you, for them, or for the organization. I didn’t like that. My last job change for responsibilities was under Interim President Liz Hitch. When we took and laid out that job, she actually not only gave me the responsibility and the title, she gave me money at the time. Then as I have proven myself in that job, I’ve received additional pay increases, which to me that is as it should be. This only occurred to me a couple of years ago. Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 15
I had attended a conference. I was in a session for women business officers talking about women’s issue. There was a young woman; she was probably about thirty. That was her big point at the table; women undersell themselves. She told the story of applying for a job at a private university. She was going into the interview with the president; she was a finalist. One of her colleagues asked her, “What are you are going to ask for in salary.” She said, “I don’t know. I don’t have any experience in higher ed. I was thinking 80,000.” Her colleague said, “You are not going to do that.” She pulled her into her office and said, “You are worth more than that. You are going to ask for 100,000 dollars.” “I don’t think I’m worth it.” “How do you know you are not worth it? If that is what the job is worth, ask for 100,000 dollars.” So she got her courage up and she sat across the table from this president who said, “How much were you thinking?” She said, “Well, I was thinking 100,000 dollars.” She said, “I just sat there thinking, he is going to run me out of the room. He sat in his chair for a minute and thought and he said, ‘Okay, you are hired.’” She has other women who she has told that story to. They will call her up before they go on a job interview and say, “Give me the talk. Give me the talk.” I wished I had had someone give me that talk because I think that’s what kept my salary down over time. I was not assertive or aggressive as men are; I just should have been.
KW: I see that in a lot of women. I don’t know why we undersell ourselves because we usually are the ones that do four times as much in our jobs.
LM: Right.
KW: What would you say has been the most difficult trial has been in your life, if you could share that?
LM: My difficult trial is really quick and easy for me to come to. I contemplated about it and said I was not going to cry about it today, and you didn’t know you did this. But you said those words and I thought, Yep, see it’s still there. I didn’t want two kids; I wanted more than that. I wanted at least four. We spent a couple of difficult years going to fertility doctors, treatments, blah-blah-blah, and testing trying to come up with a way to make more kids. Our second daughter is a gift from God. I think we had to go through all that to say, “She was your gift; stop knocking.” Sort of that realization of we are only going to get two kids. What you said that you didn’t know that you said, but became very painful during that time; it’s not painful anymore. People would say, Oh you just have two kids, and it was always just two. In Utah, two is a just. It always has a just in front of it. Anywhere else in the country people would say, You have two kids, but here just two. I had a great colleague at the time. She was the assistant attorney general who was assigned to UVU who helped me through this a lot. She had two boys, and I don’t know whether she wanted more or less. We would talk about this just statement a lot. It was during the same time—I’m LDS. It was at the same season that it felt like to me when everything was saying, Women go back home. Women your role is to raise children. Women this, women that—Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 16
KW: Is this during the Proclamation5—
LM: It was way before the Proclamation; it would have been like 1990 time frame. We were
living in a ward where people had humongous families.6 They seemed to kick out kids
any time they wanted. My husband had a sister who became pregnant out of wedlock,
and all the stories were on TV about cocaine babies. And you’re just like, “Please Lord
I’m here. My husband is educated now. We’re going to have a house; we have five
bedrooms. Why can’t we have kids?” It became very challenging, very straining on me,
very straining on him. It was very emotional.
KW: I’m sorry.
LM: Even to this day, I feel as though there are people who don’t know me who would look at
me and say, “Well, that is a career woman. This woman wanted a career. Look she only
had two children. Of course she wanted a career; there’s evidence right there. She only
had two children. She traded family for career.” I didn’t trade anything. I still in my heart
wanted a big family, big meaning four, which isn’t even big in Utah. We wanted more
kids desperately, but we couldn’t have them. There is still the sense even now when my
youngest is twenty-five. That I still feel like because people didn’t know me or know we
were going through that experience that say—even family members, who in their heads
think, They only had two kids because Linda wanted a career. I didn’t only have two
kids because I wanted a career. I could have had four kids and had a career.
KW: I didn’t grow up here, and I had fertility problems too—
LM: Usually when I talk to people, I find out that so many people do.
KW: Um-hm, wow, what an interesting concept to have to go through that.
[50:31]
LM: It was—it seemed every religious lesson I heard was about having more kids. It was very,
very heartbreaking to actually get to that point when you say, “We are really not going to
have any more kids, okay now what?” That’s the other axiom I have used my whole life,
and it started when I was very young. Well if I didn’t get that and, Heavenly Father, that
was such a great thing that I wanted, I had to take that into “now what?” I had a sister
who struggled her whole life with— when I get on the other side I’m going to ask him
why he did this to me. This was so painful to me. I just thought watching her; this is just
not healthy. I thought, You know what? You can’t do that in life. I can’t be, “Oh I have
5. Kimberly refers to "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" from the First
Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was issued in 1995.
6. A ward is the basic ecclesiastical unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 17
been treated so poorly.” “Oh, I just cannot have this so I’m going to be sad and upset my whole life about this.” “Or, I have to go to work.” And that’s how it felt initially. I have to go to work. I’m going to be mad about this. No, if this is what we have, now what?
By the time, I’m twenty-six, I’m done having children. That means by the time I’m forty I’m a mother-in-law. Part of what we have taken from that is, we struggled for a long time with school and being established as a family financially, but because of the timing of our children, we’re at this point now, I’m fifty-one, and my kids are raised. I’m saying “So now what?” You have given me these opportunities. How do I use this to bless others? What do you want me to do?
I have a dear friend who was a neighbor. I went to high school with him. When my oldest was graduating from high school, he had recently gotten married for the first time and had two of his kids. He was starting this path. I was near the end of my path. I have always laid that in perspective and thought there were things he was able to do when he was single and not with kids. That’s great. I didn’t do those. I have this different opportunity at the other end of my life. What has that got in store for me? It is sort of the “what now.”
KW: I look at you, and I think that the Lord needed a woman like you to come into this university because of your knowledge and the way that you could solve problems. You have been a great instrument here. I know when you want to have children that is—
LM: Right, it is portrayed off that—
KW: —hard. You probably have not seen the good that you have done for all these people that have gained an education here—
LM: Right.
KW: —and the programs that were able to be built here because of your great skills and taking care of the budget. I think what would the world be like if every woman stayed at home to raise children.
LM: Right, right. It wouldn’t be the same and so that’s part of the dilemma that I had with the whole women should go home; there were people quitting and going home. I really do say sincerely, it’s your decision. If that’s your decision and you can make that work, good on you. I have a sister-in-law who has done that her whole life, and it works for her. I don’t know if that would work for me. My oldest daughter, it works for her. My youngest daughter would love to be married, would love to have children and have a career. She is sort of like me: I can have it all kind of person. She doesn’t see herself just doing that; she really wants to push that expanse different ways. It is not just here at UVU that I think, If not this, then what? I have great relationships with my nephews and nieces, my siblings. I was able to take care of my mother in her final years, and the business sense, helped me take care of her estate. I could give that time to her because I didn’t have young kids and because I had older daughters. They were very helpful to me during that Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 18
time where other siblings were either older or far away or had young kids of their own and weren’t able to balance those things. I was able to balance that into my life. There are a lot of things. I’m sort of the family connector. Everyone in the family might not talk to each other, but they’ll talk to me. We plan the annual family party. I have nieces, nephews, and great-nieces and nephews that have me come to their volleyball games and stuff. To me that is part of the “if I can’t have this, now what” because something else will help me. I know it’s helping them, but it’s helping me. It is building me as well.
KW: Right, right.
LM: There’s something I was going to say about that. Oh, my oldest daughter had fertility problems. Her and her husband, they were married seven years before they had their first child. Watching her struggle through that one, she was working to help support him through school, and it’s not what she wanted to do. That was really hard. As he got closer to being done with school, they started into fertility testing again. She got pregnant and had her first one. Then she got pregnant with the second one. I know they are probably at that point that they are thinking, Are we going to have another one? I don’t know where they are at with that. But I know that at least because I have been through that I can say, “I understand where you have been, what this does, and what it takes.” I know how hard it is to deal with that because it’s a different feeling. I’m blessed to have two. I count it as a blessing, but it wasn’t what I had planned.
KW: I understand that. My third one was a huge surprise to me, and she’s been just an incredible blessing to me. I really understand that.
LM: In my immediate family, brothers and sisters, infertility is a problem. It is not like my brothers and sisters per se, but my oldest sister never had any and adopted two. The next sister had one and adopted one. My next brother, they had two and then they had fertility problems. They finally got three more including the last one was a total surprise. My next brother, their first one born very early and died. She had to go through a procedure to keep some. She had four more. I had two and then my next sister only had two. In our immediate family, we all get it. We all get the blessing of children because for none of us did this come easy. For none of us was it just, Yeah, yeah we will just go and do this. [In] my immediate family, it is valued. My husband’s family, I think they totally don’t get me. They totally don’t get this why we only had two. They don’t understand that, and I think that’s a challenge.
KW: Especially living here in Utah Valley, you go into a mall and everybody’s pregnant. That must have been very difficult for you and it is very hard. People just assume everybody can get pregnant, and they don’t have that problem. I fully understand.
LM: Yes.
KW: What advice would you like to give to Utah women today?
LM: Don’t underestimate yourself. Not just in career and education. Don’t underestimate theUtah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 19
good you can do in your home in your community. I haven’t just done stuff here. I was the president of a children’s choir that my kids were in. I took them to Washington DC. These kids got to have experiences that they wouldn’t have had.
I’m a firm believer in education. I’ve become converted to that. I’m first generation. My husband’s first generation. It’s very evident to us the difference it makes in your life. I don’t just mean financially it gives you better stuff. I mean civically, communications, problem-solving, situations you can keep yourself out of or get yourself into. Opportunities that abound all those ways. It just makes such a difference in your life and in your kids’ life. The ability to choose your working environment, your work situation, your hours. Those things are all there.
Don’t underestimate yourself, but do what feels right in your heart. If you are fighting against what feels right in your heart, man or woman, you are not going to be happy. We’re supposed to be happy. (laughs) That is some of the advice I would give.
Find good mentors, mentors who are sincere about you. Not mentors who want to say, I will be happy to be your mentor. People who really sincerely care about you.
In fact, they might not even know that you’re looking at them as a mentor. Learn from them. Learn everything you can about everything you can early on. You don’t know what opportunities will lie if you learn those things.
KW: I could not agree with you more. What would you like to be remembered for? That’s a huge question.
[01:00:29]
LM: Yeah. (laughs)
KW: How do you begin to answer that?
LM: That’s a good question. Sorry I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional about that. Um, Janette Hales Beckham is a woman that I just admire, like unbelievably admire. I knew her story, and I knew who she was. She was a General Young Women’s president of the Church.7 She had been a state legislator; she lost her husband. She’d remarried. Janette Hales Beckham was put on our board of trustees a long time ago. Long before I started regular interactions with trustees, I would watch her, and I remember watching her through the Michael Moore situation here at UVU. I just remember her wisdom. And she’d never get in a dither, just even and thoughtful. Her perspective was, I’m not going to get down in the grit of the situation. I’m up here and I’m going to think about this. Then when she said something, it would be profound. I still admire that about her. I still am amazed at how wise she is. I remember her talking at something—oh, we honored her a year ago at an event. They read her résumé. She got up and said, “I never wanted my
7. The Young Women is a youth organization in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 20
life to be remembered as a list.” That just stuck with me.
I don’t want my life to be remembered as a list. I don’t want my impact to be remembered as a list. I would like the impact to be remembered more in how I helped others. My demeanor, I want to be remembered for being positive, for being upbeat, for being happy, for having humor, for being bright, for being creative, but not for a single event or award or single title. Those are the list things. I want to be a friend. I want to be a colleague. I want to be trusted. I want to be a part of a team. I want to be known for someone who could take on a challenge successfully, someone who could navigate the environment, and reflect well on the rest of the team and the university.
In a personal sense, it’s that same way. The list doesn’t really matter. Maybe that’s the trade off part. I have two beautiful daughters. I have a husband I’ve been married to for thirty-two years who’s my best friend.
KW: Oh, and grandkids.
LM: I have two beautiful grandchildren. Oh, yes don’t even get me started on them. They are just adorable. I love them. I have great relationships with my siblings, and like I said, my nieces and nephews. I love them all. I want to be that fun-loving, creative, organized, keep-us-together sort of lady who is known for: She was successful, but she had a heart. She was successful, but she’d sit down and blow bubbles with the kids or do whatever it is that is fun. To me, be in the moment and just enjoy the journey along the way—those sort of strange things that you want to be known for, but it’s not a title. It’s not those sorts of accomplishment. It’s not the list. It’s, did people like working with me? Did they enjoy the interaction? Did I contribute? I don’t want to be known for detracting things. I want to be contributing things. Maybe someday someone would say she was a mentor. Maybe it will be somebody that just surprises me. That would be eerie, but awesome at the same time. I would hope that I could help people see that they can achieve things that they didn’t think they could. I like Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote, “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I like people who can do things.” I hope people would feel like I support people in doing things. That I’d be remembered for someone who does things, that can make things happen, but does it with people in mind and recognizing human beings all around.
KW: Not climbing over the top of someone.
LM: Not climbing over the top. That I lifted people, they lifted me, and together we all lifted each other. That was healthy; I want to be part of a healthy organization.
KW: It seems that people like Lucille and yourself that you were not climbing over the top of somebody else. You were there. You wanted a success of the whole organization—
LM: The whole organization, yes.
KW: —which you really see that. I told her that I have had such a pleasant experience coming Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 21
to school here. Being a nontraditional student, it’s just been the most enjoyable experience.
LM: You didn’t ask me about nontraditional students—
KW: Oh—
LM: —I have some thoughts on that.
KW: —okay.
LM: I was that; that was awkward. That was very awkward being a nontraditional student—
KW: It is terrifying—
LM: —it is terrifying, and I’d frequently go to people and I would say, “Folks, we have got to do more for evening non-traditional evening students because you don’t know what it is like to be them.” It’s not the same. You are in there with eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds who are preparing for the LSAT, and you’re thinking I will be happy just getting through this class. I’m trying to keep up with that. I have a husband to go home to and kids. I would always try to disappear in the back of the room. I don’t know if you did that. But I was this sort of—I think it was because I worked here. I worked here visibly. I didn’t work here somewhere nobody knew. I worked here in a visible position. In fact, as I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, my title was director of budgets. I’m thinking, Okay I’m director of budgets, and they’re going to figure out that I don’t have a degree. It was very unnerving to feel like I’m in a position in higher education where people are looking and saying, “You are really not qualified for that.” These faculty members are going to know the director of budget is in my class. Doesn’t she have a degree? It was very difficult. I would try to sit in the back of the class. Seriously, the first two class periods I would try to melt. Please don’t ask what we do; don’t do that. Partly, because I didn’t want the faculty member to feel awkward and I didn’t want the class members to feel awkward. I just wanted to be a student in the room and disappear in the crowd. It was kind of hard to do that here.
In my accounting classes, I also discovered a lot of the women did that. We sat in the back of the room even in the early 2000s, late nineties. In fact, one of my high school friends was in some of my accounting classes. We would sit by each other, and we would tend to be in the back of the room. I think part of it was we felt like, well the young kids are here to get the full experience. We are kind of the observers in the classroom. I don’t know why we felt that way, if it was our mothering instinct, if we thought this is really for them, but we are here and we are going to get the same stuff, but it’s really for them. It is very odd to go through my bachelor’s degree that way. Graduate school no, that was not a problem at all. In my undergrad that was very awkward to be this mother old enough to be the mother of some of these kids in a classroom and having a different relationship with faculty members then as colleagues being a student. That was very different.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 22
KW: Were there a lot of nontraditional students here at that time because now I know now there are quite a few?
LM: There were quite a few at night, but there were still—I would take a morning class or I would take whatever and then I would be in with the typical students. Nontraditional, not so much. Again I think again I hung to the back. Part of the reason too was that some of the classes where I would be up front or in center—I took sociology of the family from Ron Hammond. I did sit more front and center, and he would pick on me a lot. I don’t mean rudely or anything. He’d call on me. I’m assertive, and I do like to speak up. I don’t like to waste time. I want to get moving. Because I was married and had been married over a decade at least at that point, what is your experience? I’m in the class, and I’m a student here. I love Ron; we are great friends and had a great relationship, and it was a good class, but was awkward to be this [example]. Well, she’s married and I guess she will tell us what it like. That’s what it is like for me, but I don’t know what it will be for you. I think maybe after that class I thought I’m just going to hang out the back of the class in a corner and maybe I won’t get called on as much. It just always felt awkward to me. I felt like sometimes they had to call on me because of my position or I’d feel bad. I’m thinking, Oh, don’t call on me; please call on them.
KW: That would be a very interesting experience because you did work here.
LM: It was awkward. I think one of the other influences to come back to school—the ward that we were living in at that time—there were three or four women whose kids were all now all in school. They decided they were all going to become nurses. I watched; they had Young Women’s president callings and stuff. I watched what they did to get through nursing studies here at UVU. It was phenomenal. They would have to lock themselves in closets to study and they would talk about that. I just thought, Wow, how are you doing this? I watched them do it, and I watched them succeed. I thought if they can do it, I can do it. They helped me, and they didn’t even know they were mentors, but they were mentors to me. I would watch them do that and I thought, If those ladies could get through that—they got through chemistry—I can get through this class.
KW: It’s tough, I know when I took my [college math] 1050 class, I did not learn this stuff in high school.
LM: I didn’t either in 1050, no.
KW: The kids that were in my class, they were familiar with it from high school. I thought they didn’t teach us that in high school. It was learning completely new things. I learned to hang out with eighteen-year-olds. They were my—
LM: That’s right and go to the tutoring lab—
KW: I did—Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 23
LM: —and you are thinking, Oh man, I’m in the tutoring lab. I’m how old and I’m in the tutoring lab.
KW: I was in there, and my study partner was eighteen years old. I knew her from my brother’s ward. She was the same age as one of my nieces—
LM: Yeah—
KW: —it was pretty funny. This school to me, you can definitely tell there have been some women that have been there in leadership positions that have—
LM: —helped to make it comfortable, acceptable.
KW: Yes, I have felt that. I’ve never felt uncomfortable—I mean the first day, I was terrified.
LM: Yes, and that is ourselves we are terrified—
KW: You think people are looking at you, and they’re not. They’re just—
LM: They are just as terrified as you are. Like the saying, Don’t worry what you look like on the beach because everyone is worried about what they are wearing and about what they look like. It’s the same sort of thing. That’s what we are thinking, that everyone is judging me and they’re not. They are sitting there thinking you are judging me.
In one of my accounting classes, I think she was in a couple, Becky Zabriskie, she was a young single mom. We would sit in the back of the room. She works here on campus now. She’s delightful. She is remarried, and she has had additional kids. I still just think, I remember sitting next to you, Becky, in accounting classes, and I loved it. To some extent, maybe it keeps me grounded. I may have a position, but I love that I would be just as comfortable hanging out with Becky as I’m sitting in the president’s cabinet. That is another story I’m going to tell you.
KW: It’s because we are all people, and that’s what we forget. You put all these titles on them and you put these clothes on them, but they are just people.
[01:14:00]
LM: Yes, they are just people. Okay I’m going to tell you a couple of quick feminism stories—
KW: Okay, I would love for you to do that.
LM: When I first moved from academic affairs into the president’s suite, we didn’t have any money. I’m sorry, but we just didn’t have money. My husband was going to school, and I had had both of my kids by that point. I shopped at Pykettes at that time. I don’t know if you know what Pykettes are, the polyester pants with the button-up shirts, and that’s what Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 24
we could afford. I was going upstairs, and at that time, the president’s secretary was scary. (laughs) She was the dress for success queen. Lucille’s secretary was not scary, she was very sweet, but she was also dressed for success. And here I’m thinking I cannot do it. I remember telling Barbra Hoge and still remember where we were when I said this, and she just broke out laughing. I said, “I don’t care what they say. I’m not going up there wearing colored pantyhose.” She burst out laughing because they were doing three-piece suits with the colored pantyhose. I’m thinking, I cannot do this. I have two young kids. I can’t afford a wardrobe. I don’t want that wardrobe anyway. It’s never been my thing. Dress for success was huge at the time. I thought, How am I ever going to fit in. I thought, Well, they had better take me as I’m. I’m not going to wear jeans. I’ll do the best I can, but that is all I have.
Within a few months of me moving up there, another dear friend who was a single mom at the time moved from the parking office into that suite as a secretary to a vice-president. She was worse off than I was. She clearly didn’t have money. She had four little kids. She was working to keep her kids and her family together. She had to wear jeans. She didn’t have anything else. I thought you know to some extent maybe I ground broke so that when that happened, she was not alone. She was someone I could bond with that said, “I cannot be them. They’re towards the end of career and they can do that; we cannot do that. We will do the best we can do.” That dress for success was a big deal.
In that same environment and I don’t want to name names, but this was an era of feminism and not total acceptance yet. Another dear friend was working for another colleague in the president’s suite. Her boss—and it was in those days when you pushed the phone and would say, “Linda, can you come in?” It was that kind of a thing—he would push the button and say, “Mrs. Reed, can you come into my office.” I would just bristle; she’s not Mrs. Reed when she is in this office. She is Joanne. It just irritated me. She’d just go in dutifully. I love Joanne, but she was very dutiful.
I don’t know what spawned this, but at the time this individual decided that it would be best if all of those on the president’s cabinet—I don’t know what we called it back then, the council—if their secretaries would refer to them always by the appropriate titles. I was to call my boss, Dr. Warner instead of Doug, and he would call me Mrs. Makin instead of Linda. Gosh, I thought, Are you kidding me? It just irritated me so much. They called us ladies in to a special president’s council meeting to discuss this. Picture this room and they’re in there, and Lucille was in there—love Lucille—the president and vice-presidents and us secretaries come in the room. This proposal comes on the table and I’m just wanting to (sound of wringing a neck) but I was patient. I thought, We will see what happens now. First of all, I’m thinking are you going to stick up for me, my boss or what. I’m thinking it is in your court. Dr. Wayne Kearney who is just a sweet, sweet man, he was the vice-president of student affairs, and he said, “I have never had a problem with these women referring to me inappropriately. I do not think this is necessary.” Lucille said something very similar and it died. I thought, Thank you so much because I could not imagine being called Mrs. Makin at work. I’m not Mrs. Makin—Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 25
[01:18:38]
KW: Sounds like you were going back to Leave it to Beaver—
LM: (laughs) Oh, it was so challenging. I just thought, Really you’re going to do this to us? How could you do this to us? I have one other story about the women doing to women. I have a dear friend, a colleague who was our HR director for a while—not the same one that I had the argument with but a different one—she had worked her way up through Geneva Steel. She was in the First Wave Feminism; she clearly was. That was her lens—the First Wave of feminism. She had started, it was a male dominated industry. At least higher ed. has not solely been dominated by men, but this was the steel industry. It was unions and that was a male-dominated industry. She had managed to have a very successful career [and] was very well respected not only at Geneva, but at US Steel. [She] had a great reputation. She had that First Wave Feminism, this is how women behave in the work place and this is how you climb a ladder and this is how you do things. I remember her one day as I was climbing the ladder I guess, saying to me, “Now, Linda” in this sort of motherly tone.
“Now, Linda, you need to be careful about who you go to break with because who you go to break with is who they’re going to associate you with. As you climb your career you need to make sure folks see you associating with the right people.” I thought, Are you kidding me. Like thank you for the advice, I’m going to go to break with whoever my friends are. For years break was like this standard thing, it was go grab three secretaries, and we wandered down and got a drink and came back together. I didn’t care. If I could not be seen with the people that were my friends, I didn’t want to be advanced. I wanted to have the opportunity to go on break with whomever I wanted to go with. That is another one of those women things and that wasn’t helpful. That may have been how you climbed the ladder, but it was not going to be how I was going to climb it.
KW: To look at it from her side, how sad that she would have to do that.
LM: Yes.
KW: How sad that she could not really truly just have friends because you have common interest, but she had to pick and choose so that she would be able to have a successful career. That is very sad.
LM: To maintain your same friendships. I know it’s challenging it is hard to have dear friends and now you are their supervisor. That’s challenging if you have to have crucial conversations, but we can do that and still maintain a friendship. Another Janette Hales Beckham and this one is just from this week. She said, “Women give up goals in exchange for a relationship; men give up relationships in exchange for a goal.” I’ve thought about that a lot, and I thought I’ve been trying to not give up either. Now I don’t know if I will be successful at that, but I think for either gender, for either side of that coin, we’d all be more successful if we would maintain relationships while seeking our goals and maintain our goals when getting into a relationship. Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 26
I can see what she is saying because I watched my youngest daughter start a new relationship with a young man that was not going to lead her down the path of her goals. Luckily, it ended. I thought, You are going to trade all this for that. Don’t do it. That was a dangerous relationship; it was not a healthy relationship. When she broke off that relationship and she could step back later and realize, I was really going to trade in all my goals for that.
What Janette said about that I thought that is going to stick with me for a long time. How do we as men or women whichever side we’re on how do we maintain relationships and goals at the same time? I think that is the balancing act of life.
KW: Um-hm, how do you be true to yourself, which I think for women that we are raised in a way that we weren’t supposed to—
LM: To do tradeoffs. I do do tradeoffs. I remember being on panels when my kids were younger with women who were very stressed about being in the workplace. They were stressed, How do you make this work? I said, “My kids eat Lucky Charms for dinner and I don’t care.” I don’t have to apologize to anyone. I don’t have to go home and make the dinner that my mother made. She was home all day. If my kids eat Ramen and Lucky Charms, they had a healthy lunch at school or the healthy lunch I packed, that’s my trade off. Why, because now I get to spend time with them instead of, I’m sorry, but mom has to cook you this whatever, no. Corndogs and tater tots, whatever. Those are the tradeoffs that I made in exchange for relationships.
[01:23:53]
KW: I think being a nontraditional student and coming back to school, that has been a lesson for me. I always worked and predominantly a single mom throughout my kids lives. I tried to balance and make sure that I cooked these great meals, had this clean house, and worked. Then coming to school [I think] who cares about the house? Who cares what they eat.
LM: I’ve struggled with the word balance. Balance is still sort of a trade off; one thing goes lower. It’s still sort of a trade off. One of the concepts that I still have not been able to fully express, but I will try again. I like the word harmony. If you think of an orchestra and maybe it’s not a good harmony there probably is another musical word if I knew music better. If you think of an orchestra playing a symphony and all the instruments are there, they can all be playing at the exact same time. But it might be the piccolo you hear this time, and it might be the violin you hear this time; it might be the drummer you hear this time, but they are all still there. They’re all still a part of who I am, but at this particular moment this part of me is getting louder and stronger than this part of me. When my kids were little, oh my gosh, I did crafts and creative stuff, and we did the fun holiday, and now you know what, that part of me is tucked away, and I will use it with grandkids, but it is not as important to me—other things—but they are still part of me. They are still in that harmony, and I didn’t have to remove it from the scale, I just toned itUtah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 27
down and made something come out stronger.
KW: That is really a great analogy, it really is.
LM: Balance is a trade off; harmony is also part of me. Someday maybe I will write that.
KW: Thank you. I really appreciate you agreeing to this. Just really appreciate having some of your insights.
LM: Are you open for one more?
KW: Oh, I would love that—
LM: I’ve been talking too much—
KW: —no, no I don’t know your time. I would love to sit and chat with you. I just don’t want to impose on you.
LM: Because you are a nontraditional student. You worked for how long?
KW: Gosh, ever since I was eighteen so—
LM: Okay.
KW: I worked in the beauty industry for twenty-five, twenty-six years. Then moved here five years ago, then started a new career, and then because of the economy, I was laid off my job.
LM: Okay, in higher ed. because that is the only industry I have ever worked in, degrees are currency; they are the ticket to ride. For so long of my career, I mean only in the last ten years, have I had a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t have a degree and I felt owned. Let me describe what I mean by owned. First of all, it’s a hidden secret; no one told anyone. It was like, if I can keep this secret, it is better. When I was working towards finishing my degree, I discovered that two other women in my position in the state also didn’t have bachelor’s degrees. We had never shared that with each other. We were so afraid that someone might find out about our secret, that somehow we were not qualified to do what we were doing. It felt like that.
The other thing I found out, I had a colleague; she is still a colleague, and she didn’t have a bachelor’s degree either. We would frequently talk about the frustration we felt over not having a degree, not feeling extremely supported to get our degree, in fact, sometimes feeling like they’re trying to keep us from getting our degree. Feeling the real sense that we are not mobile and they know it. They can overlook us, treat us badly, or whatever. Whatever injustice of the day we would blame on this. We coined the phrase, owned and owned is powerful word because what it means is “older women needing educational degrees.” Why did I want my degree, because I didn’t want to be owned anymore. I Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 28
wanted to be set free. When I had my bachelor’s degree, there was this sense of all right if I feel like I’m treated unjustly, I’m not owned anymore; I can go somewhere else. I like that phrase and I think for women who are nontraditional older women needing educational degrees—I know that’s how I felt. I very much felt like, they all know that I cannot go on anywhere because I won’t make it through first screening because I don’t have an educational degree.
KW: Isn’t that sad?
LM: It is sad, but I think of you now and you are going to have a degree. You are not going to be owned anymore. You are going to have opportunities that you didn’t have before you had your degree.
KW: For me personally, it’s given me such a sense of accomplishment. It’s also been such a great gift to communicate with my children—
LM: Yes.
KW: My oldest daughter came here. She didn’t have any support system because I was still up in Washington. She quit going to school and [now] she works for an attorney. When I originally came, I got my associate’s in paralegal studies—
LM: Oh, good.
KW: I started talking to her and saying, “You do everything that a paralegal does, but you are not getting paid a paralegal’s wage.” She has been coming back to school.
LM: Good, good for her.
KW: As a mother [I have found] education is so powerful to be able to help your children. My youngest is graduating this year and [I say], “You need to do this. We need to get you in here; let’s get you in that.
LM: They don’t always appreciate that we are now able to help them navigate. We had no one to help us navigate. We had to discover it for ourselves. They probably will take for granted or think, Stop it. I know what I can do. But we know where to navigate them.
KW: My youngest one I think she is really happy. My middle one, she will graduate here this spring.
LM: That’s great.
KW: She was the one who helped hold my hand a little bit along the way. You know, you need to fill out this out, Mom; you need to do this. Now she is just like the youngest one has had such a great opportunity. I’m like, but aren’t you happy for her. I did the best that I could do. Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 29
LM: That’s right.
KW: At least now, I can help her along the way.
LM: That’s true, so have you graduated or you will?
KW: It is funny when you are older and wiser. I was trying to graduate this spring. I was cramming everything in. I took a step back and there are all these opportunities of undergraduate writing to get things published; that’s my goal. I was in the business school getting my associate’s and I was not associated with humanities, which that’s where I’m at right now. I just thought, Why am I rushing to get this degree because I know what I want to do. I need to go on to graduate school.
LM: True.
KW: I might as well get all the education I can in undergraduate. I’m going to stay another year. I’m doing—
LM: The project.
KW: —the Women’s Walk, and I’m associated with Bill Cobb, and he has me working on his Vietnam Oral History Project.
LM: Oh, good.
KW: I’ve just got these great opportunities.
LM: Bill and Marilyn are awesome.
KW: He has been a great mentor for me.
LM: He is such a great guy.
KW: I’m doing that to market myself. I can take a class and learn how to write grants and that is a great skill.
LM: Yes, it is.
KW: So that’s kind of, what I’m doing.
LM: Good.
KW: I love it here.
LM: That’s good Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 30
KW: I appreciate people like yourself who have given your time and your dedication in building such a great institution.
LM: Well, thank you.
KW: Thank you, I appreciate it.
[01:33:15]
End of interview

UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY
Utah Valley University Library
George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections
Oral History Program
Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories
Directed by Michele Welch
Interview with Linda Makin
by
Kimberly Williamson
March 23, 2012
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Linda Makin
Interviewer: Kimberly Williamson
Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 23 March 2012
Recordist: Catherine McIntyre
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Kimberly Williamson
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: LM = Linda Makin (Interviewee)
KW = Kimberly Williamson (Interviewer)
Brief Description of Contents:
Linda Makin talks about growing up in Lehi, Utah, attending Utah Technical College at Provo (UTC) and the path that eventually led her to become Utah Valley University’s Chief Planning Budget & Policy officer. She describes meeting her husband, Mike Makin and how they raised their two daughters with them both working full-time and attending college. She also shares the heartbreak of fertility issues causing her to not have the large family she desires. She leaves advice for Utah women to find good mentors, don’t underestimate the good you can do, as well as recognizing your own personal worth. She speaks openly about discrimination issues, being true to herself, and other lessons she has learned along the way. Since the interview, in June 2013 Makin was appointed by UVU Pres. Matthew Holland as the Vice President for Planning, Budget and Human Resources at Utah Valley University. This division includes the offices of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning, Budget, Institutional Research and Information, Human Resources, and Policy.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 2
Audio Transcription
[01:28]
Beginning of interview
KW: My name is Kimberly Williamson. Today is Friday, March 23, 2012, and I’m at the George Sutherland Archives in the Utah Valley University library. Today I’m interviewing Linda Makin for my senior project and with your approval in the Utah Women’s Walk. Today we are going to talk about her life and the many contributions she has made at Utah Valley University during her years of service.
I just want to thank you and for agreeing to this. You came from a large family in Lehi, Utah.
LM: Yes, I did.
KW: Do you want to tell us about your family structure and where you fit into your family.
LM: I’m the fifth of six children. There were two daughters, then two sons, and then two more daughters. I’m the fifth of six—a mother and father who were happily married over—I’m trying to remember—they were approaching their sixtieth wedding anniversary when my father passed away. Grew up small town, lived in the same house my whole life on the same street until I got married and moved out of the house.
KW: Do you have a lot of family heritage there in Lehi?
LM: No, my mother was from Beaver, Utah. She was born and raised there. My father was born and raised in Paragonah, Utah, so they’re both southern Utah, sort of southern central Utah. They met during World War II. She was still in high school. She got married to my dad before she graduated high school. He is six years older than her. They moved on to the family farm and after a while she said, “This is not what I want to do. You’ve got to get me out of here.” They moved north, he took a variety of jobs, and he finally settled on a position at the Dugway Proving Grounds, which is out in western Utah sort of out in the middle of nowhere and he thankfully didn’t make us move to Dugway, but we moved to Lehi. He made a very long daily commute until he retired. He was there I think over thirty years. We were grateful not to have to live in Dugway in that environment; we were happy to live in a neighborhood that was stable.
KW: Your father’s family, they were farmers and your mother’s family?
LM: Um, I don’t know what her father did. They probably did farming. I know that her mother, my grandmother, did nursing and midwifing, you know, back in the early 1900s, helping others out taking in laundry and things like that to help make ends meet. My mother grew up very poor.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 3
KW: Wow. Where there any women in your life that you admired growing up?
LM: My mother and my grandmother because they were of course the maternal people that I saw. My grandmother suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for many years. I never remember her without a cane and her without knees bowed out. She literally suffered for many, many years. She was widowed for seventeen years. She and I were very close. I loved my relationship with my grandmother because she as grandmothers do let you do and try things that mothers tend not to have time for. She would let me walk to the store that was a few blocks away when I was seven or eight and go buy whatever we needed to make lunch with, then put me up to the stove and let me stir and help cook. She had an old pump organ in a back room of her house. I taught myself to play on that organ. She was so proud of that. She just gave me opportunities that I loved to explore my talents those kinds of things. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She kept a very clean house, very orderly, took good care of things. That is how we survived when we didn’t have much. Beyond that, teachers, the female teachers that I had in elementary school were very kind to me. They taught me a lot of things. My next-door neighbor was the lunch lady at the elementary school. To me those were about the only type of jobs that women were having was the lunch lady and a teacher.
KW: Were you aware of your grandmother’s participation in being a midwife, nurse type thing?
LM: I did, but it was more she did odd jobs. It wasn’t something—I don’t think they did it because it was a high profile position in the community. It was more that was what poor folk did to help the rich folk so I was aware of what she did that way.
KW: The one grandmother you were close with, did she stay in southern Utah or did she move up?
LM: After my parents moved up, they moved up to American Fork. My grandfather began to work for Tooele Army Depot. That was the most stable job I think that he had in his life, was once he started working for the government.
KW: Were there any incidences in your childhood that you can think of that led you to your life’s work that you’re doing right now?
LM: I don’t know what led me exactly to my life’s work. I think about what may have led me to even this industry or whatever. In elementary school, I would walk or ride my bike to Lehi library all summer long. I did the reading programs and the story times. I always had books checked out in the library. I loved going to the library. I think her name was— oh, I can’t remember now. I remember her, and remember sitting at the desk and just having that welcoming environment where you can learn. You can come here to learn and have a bigger world. I remember reading Helen Keller’s story over and over again and those sorts of things of women overcoming challenges [and] the educational environment. The other thing I would say was my initial career was secretarial, and my dad was a ward Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 4
clerk for the LDS Church for it felt like forever when I was a young person.1 In fact, in
my office today, I still have the typewriter. It’s an old heavy iron typewriter; it’s in my
office now because back in those days, they didn’t have the clerk offices. They had the
bishop office, but no clerk office.2 He would do the clerking at home. I remember the
carbon paper, the onionskin paper, and the typewriter ribbons, and the clack, clack of the
typewriter late into the night as he did his clerk work. I knew that he was exact, and I
knew that he took pride in doing his work right. I sort of saw that so maybe it was a blend
of those two things of an office and educational learning environment.
KW: Were you good in math when you were in school? Was it a subject that you really liked?
LM: I was good at it; I didn’t love it. Back in the seventies when I was in high school, the
nerdy girls did math. I didn’t want to be the nerdy girl. I took a dare from my algebra
teacher in high school who dared me to take geometry, and I didn’t want to take
geometry. I’m really not spatially orientated and that’s what I thought geometry— how
big’s this room? I have no idea. He dared me and I talked a few of my friends into it. He
tolerated us in his geometry class, and I did very well in geometry. I did it on a dare. I
didn’t do it because I just loved math. Accounting was taught at our high school. Again,
the boys did that. In fact, I don’t know if the girls took accounting. To me I thought well
that is a nerdy thing, I don’t want to take accounting. I did office procedure and shorthand
and typing. I took all sorts of awards for shorthand and typing and office procedure. Back
when I was in high school, I was the business Sterling Scholar. I thought my path was
secretary or maybe teaching business, but I really thought secretary.
KW: That is what your first associate’s degree was in—
LM: It was—
KW: —secretarial, okay. You graduated third.
LW: I graduated third in my class in high school.
KW: Did you feel smart? Did you know that is where you ranked?
LM: I knew that I was bright. I knew I was smart. I knew that I was third in my class, but
again I didn’t want to be nerdy. I can’t be nerdy. The girl who was first was very, very
smart, a very kind person, but nerdy. She didn’t do drama, drill team, band, and all those
things. That’s what I wanted to do too. I wanted this more full experience. To me
somehow I thought only focusing on my education would have been a nerdy thing to do.
1. The formal name of the LDS Church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints.
2. A bishop is the ecclesiastical leader of a Latter-day Saint congregation or ward. A
ward is the basic ecclesiastical unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 5
I knew I was bright. I did advanced English, but I didn’t take the AP test because I thought I don’t need that when I’m going to secretarial school. I don’t need AP English. I will take AP English, but I won’t go and take the test, and that was dumb. I was smart and dumb at the same moment.
KW: I can understand—
LM: (laughs)
KW: We learn along the way; that is all I can say. When you came to Utah Technical College as a student, it was during the period where women were just beginning to merge into nontraditional roles. Can you tell me what your thoughts were? Did you think about that? I know that you came here and did secretarial school, but did you start thinking, Hey there might be something else?
LM: Yes, beyond the secretarial, you are in the business school. You realize there are women in accounting, really. There are women in business management. At the time, we also had a program called fashion merchandising. The cute girls were in fashion merchandising. I had no desire to go do that. At the time, we had places for women. They could be in business. They could be in accounting. They could be in secretarial. It was primarily women that were in secretarial and fashion merchandising back then. But there were some in business management and accounting. I made friends with several that were in accounting and I thought, Oh that’s not too bad. I could see a woman in that role. Still in some of the auto trades and on the Orem campus that is all there was there. You still saw mostly men in those other industrial fields.
But it was female faculty who mentored me: who saw in me potential, who encouraged me to come, who encouraged me to work for an attorney while I was in school, to stop working at the grocery store, and start building your résumé, and see what is out there. When I got my first secretarial job here, it was for a female dean. That was very unheard of. I still remember meeting Archie Alexander; he was the director of warehouse back then. First time I met him and I told him whom I worked for he said, “That Lucille Stoddard, she’s going to be president someday.” I thought, Huh. She had gained a lot of respect on campus.
KW: Did she help mentor you because I interviewed her, and I know she mentored a lot of women along the way?
LM: I’m going to put in a cough drop. Sorry about that. We’ll get my throat to stop tickling.
Lucille was a great mentor. Lucille had just gone through a divorce. She had two young daughters, and she had a son who was older, Sam. We became friends. I helped him type some of his thesis, but the two little girls, particularly her youngest—she was about five when I started working for Lucille—I just adored Nancy. She would come to my desk, “Can I have a quarter so I can go to the machines.” I loved that. I could see how Lucille was blending family and work. She was a well-respected leader. I don’t know if she Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 6
considered herself a feminist; she might have considered herself a feminist. She was fair to everyone. From that, I took even if you are a feminist you don’t have to be anti-man. She was really fair to everyone. She encouraged me. She always told me, “You can do so much more than this.” She still is a mentor to me. She still will encourage me, strengthen me, sends me notes of confidence and thank you. That’s one of the things I learned from Lucille was note writing. I didn’t know that very well. She would see things about people and write a note to them. I would send them off for her. I thought, You know, she knows how to recognize others. She was a great mentor.
[15:13]
KW: Yes, a great woman. Let’s go back a little bit; so you came here to do your associates and then you met your husband here. How far into your program, did you meet him?
LM: Okay, let’s back up. I came to do my associate’s. I did that in five semesters. I did that with encouragement of Barbra Hoge who I just adored, adored.
KW: What was her role here?
LM: She was a faculty member in business. She was also the advisor for Phi Beta Lambda, which I became involved in. She could see that I was a little bit assertive, aggressive. She gave me a book The Assertive Woman when it came out and wrote inside of it, “I don’t think you really need this.” That helped me understand a little bit about myself. So Barbra and I—I still consider her the person who really started me seeing that there is more than just what you have seen in your life. There’s more you can do and I’m encouraging you to do more.
Meeting my husband—I actually met my husband the July after I had graduated high school before I started at Utah Technical College in Provo. I’m older than him. He was about to become a senior at American Fork High School. We met; we were both working at Ream’s Grocery Store. I was a checker; he was a bagger, yeah. He was cute; I could make him blush; it was fun. (laughs) We met there. He had never really considered college. He was a Future Farmer of America; he was a state Future Farmer of America. He saw his life in farming. I wanted nothing to do with farming. I worked on my degree. I went to work for an attorney; he got job changes. We got engaged the next October. I was nearly done with my associates of applied sciences degree. He had just started a machinist program here at UTC Provo. We got married; I supported him through that degree. We had our first child. He got a job. We thought everything was going to be just as you had planned in life. Then the economy took a turn for the worst. He lost his job and couldn’t find another one. I came looking for another job. I came looking for a job. My job at UTC Provo opened again. The person who had taken my place hated it, and I stepped back into my same seat. That is amazing.
KW: Let’s go back and let’s do some dates. When were you born?
LM: 1960, August of 1960.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 7
KW: We are the same age—
LM: Oh, good.
KW: I’m actually older than you are. You graduated in ’78—
LM: Graduated in 1978.
KW: When did you and your husband marry?
LM: I met my husband July of ’78, and we married March of 1980. I was nineteen; he was eighteen when we got married. People thought we were crazy. People told us it will never last, Do you know the statistics on young marriages? We weathered some really tough times economically. That caused him some depression—and putting him through school the first time and then a second time because he decided he didn’t like shift work and he didn’t like blue-collar work. He essentially started over, and ten years after we were married, he graduated with his bachelor’s degree.
KW: That’s wonderful. After you had your first child, you then decided that you were going to be a stay-at-home mom.
LM: Yes.
KW: But then because of the economy you had to find work again. But then there was a mind change for you somewhere.
LM: Found work, um, watched him struggle with the depression and his lack of ability to find a job. I determined for myself that security was really important to me. Financial security mattered to me. That was going to be a fundamental driver for me. I needed to know that we could make rent and that we could have food on the table, that we could keep cars running. I didn’t set out to make a lot of money, just set out to have safety and stability economically. That’s really why I went back to work. I had done home sewing. I tried to do something where I would be at home, and it just didn’t work.
KW: You have your associate’s and then you did another associate.
LM: I have an associate’s of applied science, which did not require a lot of general education.
It was the hands on secretarial things: taking shorthand, typing, office procedures, business accounting. When I decided to go back to school—which I should back up on that—I could take classes free at UVU, UTC, UVSC.3 There were those with whom I
3. Linda refers to the many name changes of Utah Valley University. Utah Valley University began as Central Utah Vocational School (CUVS) in 1941. Twenty-two years later, the school’s name was changed to Utah Trade Technical Institute. In 1967, the name was again changed to Utah Technical College at Provo (UTC). During the next twenty years, Utah Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 8
worked with or for who would say, You don’t need a class. You’re smart enough; you can figure this out. It took me awhile to figure out that was their way of keeping me in my role. That is what it felt like because if I had credits, if I had credentials, I could move. I was mobile. I finally recognized that and I said, “This is ridiculous. I know I can learn it on my own, but I’m getting nothing for my résumé, and I’m not advancing to anywhere. I’m going to start taking these classes. Even though I know, I know some of these things, I need the credits. I need the certificate, the degree.” I decided to do that and I think I had taken a few classes here and there that interested me. Then decided when my oldest daughter started junior high I needed to be able to help her with math. I started my math sequence, and I thought I’m going to get through my math sequence and then we will see where I go from there. Once I get my math sequence, I continued to take my general education. [I] completed my associate’s of science degree long before I ever submitted to graduate. I had a colleague here that said, “Linda, you know, they are changing the requirements for the associate’s of science degree. If you don’t apply by this date, you are going to take more classes.” I went in, applied, got my associate’s of science degree. Still didn’t know which four-year degree I wanted. We didn’t have many back then.
KW: Right.
LM: Business management was sort of the one I started on, but it wasn’t what I felt good about. I just kept taking classes that would count for whatever degree. Got to a point— and we had accounting by now—and I said that’s really the coursework I would rather take. I went after an accounting degree and not a business management degree.
KW: Did you enjoy those classes in accounting?
LM: I loved my accounting classes, yes. To me that’s math, but it’s applied math. That is one thing I know about myself is I like applied learning more than I like studying theories.
KW: That makes sense to me. There was a man—Cameron Martin.
LM: Yes.
KW: He encouraged you to get your master’s.
LM: He did, so when I got my bachelor’s degree, Cameron was a colleague of mine, and he said, “So when are you going to get your master’s.” I said, “Cameron I can’t even talk to you about that right now. I’m so sick of school I will throw-up.” It was physical, if I have to do anything more. He said, “Okay, I appreciate that, but when are you going to do it.” I said, “Talk to me—the soonest I will do it is in a year and a half from now, so fall of
Technical began offering associate’s degrees, and its name was changed in 1987 to Utah Valley Community College to reflect its expansion. In 1993, the school began offering bachelor’s degrees and became Utah Valley State College (UVSC). In 2008, the school added master’s degrees, and changed its name a final time, to that of Utah Valley University (UVU).Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 9
2003 was the earliest I would ever consider it.” He came to me during the early winter of 2003 and said, “Hey, we need to get you a master’s program. Here are some ones I can recommend. The deadlines are coming up. I will write you a letter of recommendation. Get your stuff in.” I did and was accepted in the master’s program at BYU [Brigham Young University]—the MPA program—and over the course of three years completed that degree.
KW: Did he suggest that you go into that program?
LM: Yes, it’s a program that he had been in. He recommended it. He knew me and knew that program well enough to say, “I think this is a nice match for you.”
KW: Do you think that he foresaw the direction that you needed to go?
LM: He knew and I think from the interview in the magazine, he knew that in order to be credible, I needed a master’s degree at a minimum.4 (laughs)
KW: That particular degree because it’s a multi—
LM: A multi-faceted public administration. It gave me broad background, and he knew I already had a lot of background in that. He knew something that I could balance with work, home, and school additionally. It was a MPA program that met every Tuesday night for three years. I was in Salt Lake until ten o’clock at night and one night to do group work with other people who were working in higher education essentially.
KW: So throughout when you were getting your master’s degree, you obviously were a wife and a mother—
LM: Yes, uh-huh.
KW: —were you working full-time?
LM: Yes, full-time.
KW: Oh my gosh.
LM: Same with my bachelor’s degree. I worked full-time throughout that whole thing. That’s actually when I developed the bad habit of working late because I would do online classes. Some of them would be online. I tried to mix an online or TV class and a regular class. I would go to a class as much as possible during lunch hour or in the evening and I did quite a few evenings. I would do distance ed. or TV. I could concentrate more if I stayed an extra hour in the office and did the Internet class in my office. Then when I
4. Linda refers to “Makin Strides,” a magazine article in UVU Alumni Magazine. See Plothow, Brad. “Makin Strides: How One Alumna and her Alma Mater Rose to Influence Together.” UVU Alumni Magazine 3, no. 3 (2012): 20–25.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 10
went home and had to face the kids, the laundry, and everything else that was there.
KW: Right, this brings us to—let’s start talking about Second Wave Feminism. You were going through this. Like you said you’re juggling career and motherhood. Many women who worked had to come home and had to take on what they call the second shift of doing laundry cooking and cleaning. How did you balance that? Were you expected to do that or did your husband participate?
LM: I think in our life and I don’t know how this mirrors the Second Wave, but it probably does. Initially when my husband—so after he was unemployed and I was working again, he determined, “I do not want to be doing this kind of labor the rest of my life.” He started back to school. He would work part-time jobs, and he would go to school at night or he would go to school during the day and work part-time jobs at night. He doesn’t like the term, Mr. Mom. He hated the movie, Mr. Mom, but he was Mr. Mom. He just didn’t want to associate himself with that. He would get the kids from after school or pick them up from the sitters after school. He’d help get them fed; he would do whatever. He did that for a while. Then there was a point in our lives when he would leave for school at Weber State and we were living in American Fork. He would drive to Weber State, which is a 170 miles a day. He would leave home at six something in the morning; he would go to school. I would get the kids to school. He would come home; he would pick the kids up from the sitter. He would spend two hours with them. I’d come in the house at about five-fifteen. He would have made himself some sort of a dinner at that point. Essentially, he was self-supporting his daily needs, taking care of the kids, snack, homework, whatever. I’d come in the door, kiss him; he would leave. He would go to work until ten o’clock at night; then he’d come home. I’d give him a snack again because it would have been a long day, and then we would go to bed and then we’d repeat. We did that for two and a half years so he could get his bachelor’s degree. There were sacrifices on all of our parts during those times.
Once he’d completed his degree, and he’d gone back to work, then it was more—I think then we settled into now what are all the roles because before we were really just sharing these roles. Now we’re settling into this; he’s still got a commute. He’s working in Bountiful so he still has a huge commute. We made a conscious decision that I was going to continue working at that point. People would say, Now that he is out of school so are you going to quit working. I would think, Now that he is done with school, he is going to make the same amount that I’m making now—it was like 27,000 dollars. Why would I quit? We live like this. We don’t have cars that run. I didn’t sacrifice for ten years so we could continue to live like this. I’m not quitting work.
We decided we are going to stay put. We had the support system around us for myself and for the kids. We had good daycare. We had a good school. We had great carpooling arrangements. Why mess with that? He would just drive. So for a couple of years he drove up there and then got laid off again. He still has maintained the decision that we made back then. So we live within ten miles of my work. So he drives and has driven for twenty years up to an employer just by the Salt Lake airport. He makes the sacrifice of the commute because when we were raising the kids it was more important that I be Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 11
available. That was the role that I wanted to have. We made that decision.
Okay so now back to how we shared the workload. His commute complicated the workload. He’s always been an involved father—still is. After an hour in the car, you are pretty much zoned and done when you get home. I did do dinners. We still grocery shop together. He would still go to the store and do those sorts of things, which my dad didn’t ever do. He has done laundry. He does not like to clean the house; that is not his favorite thing. Although when he did have breaks, he would clean closets—not the way I would do—and that would cause tension. (laughs) I would say, “Why did you clean it like that.” I did carry most of the household responsibilities and for the kids. He would help with homework. He went to events. He was supportive. Back then, he would do all the yard work. He was expected to mow the lawn and do those sorts of things. What I found was my dad never let me do that as a kid—once I mowed the lawn, I found that I liked it. I liked being outside. I liked that exercise. Then it became a problem because now I liked something that was work. Then I started owning it more than I wanted. Then I had to say, “No, I know I like this, but you have to do this because you’re not liking dishes.” (laughs) There were those kinds of tradeoffs.
[30:53]
KW: With two parents working and going to school, how did that impact your kids? Were they raised appreciating an education?
LM: My oldest daughter, I think has some resentment—if this ever gets released we might have to cut this part—about me working. Early in her young womanhood, she determined she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I support that. I think stay-at-home moms are great if they can do it. Awesome, do it. She wants to do that. That is what she does now. She is a stay-at-home mom for the most part. She likes that. She’s committed in her soul to that. I mean it’s very deep. I think for her it was challenging that I worked. She was expected to have more responsibility than maybe she wanted. I don’t know; we’d have to interview her and see how she felt about that. She has a very strong commitment to being a stay-at-home mom.
KW: Did she go to college?
LM: She came to UVU, UVSC for a year at sort of my insistence, “You are going to go to college; you might as well go over there and get free tuition. You can keep working” and doing what she wanted. She met her husband here in the first semester. They were married in the second semester. She was married at age eighteen. He was twenty-two, but she was eighteen. She quit school. She would love to go back to school, but she would love to go into culinary arts. I think it is the hands on stuff that she wants to do. Again I think it’s not so much she didn’t want to go to college, but sort of my thing was go to college, get a liberal education, get an understanding. I don’t care what you major in or whatever. But she didn’t know all the opportunities for maybe some of the hands on stuff that really is more interesting to her. Creating things is what really interests her. She would like to. The offer is still there. We supported our youngest daughter through Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 12
college, and the offer still stands for her if she wants to go to college. We will help her go to school like we helped the youngest one go to school.
Our younger daughter is more of an independent soul before she was probably old enough to have been doing this by most people’s standards. The neighbor next door did daycare. Her daughter and my daughter were best friends; they still are very good friends. She could check in with Tammy after school, and they’d come to my house and have fun. Because Kassidy didn’t want to be home with all the daycare kids and Emily sort of likes her space, the two of them would have a great time. Tammy was just next door. They did that after school. In the summer, I still had to have a sitter there for them for quite a while. She’s very independent. She likes to cook, clean, do laundry, shop, and organize. She really at some point just said, “Mom, I don’t need a sitter anymore. I can do this. I’m doing this already.” She took concurrent enrollment in high school. Took some summer classes here, finished her bachelor’s degree in three years at BYU, took a year off, worked for a year full-time, and then completed law school last April as an attorney.
KW: How many children did you have?
LM: Two daughters.
KW: Oh, just two girls. That’s interesting that you have one daughter who’s one way and—
LM: They are absolutely very different.
KW: Yes, I have three daughters, and they are very different. During Second Wave Feminism, there were issues of wage discrimination, family planning, and childcare. Did any of those affect you? You were a student here during that time, but you also were working here.
LM: Childcare was hard, especially, initially with the first one. This was 1981 when she was born; it would have been around ’82 or ’83 when I was really struggling with childcare. For a while my mom helped watch, and my dad’s health got bad, and it became too much of a burden. Luckily, UTC Provo at the time offered a childcare center. I put Mandy in childcare here during the academic year. They didn’t offer it during the summer so I’d scramble for summer assistance. Institutionalized daycare wasn’t accepted very well back then. People sort of thought—
KW: Do you think it was here in Utah Valley? Is that what you are saying?
LM: I think it has changed; it is more acceptable to take your kid to KinderCare to Mountainlands Head Start—those sorts of things, but they were pretty rare back then. You mostly had to find a neighbor, friend, family to help you out. Again, we tried to find family as much as we could. Sometimes that worked well; sometimes that didn’t work well at all, especially by the time I had my second one. I had an infant that needed to be taken care of. I was home for the first year of Mandy’s life but with Emily, I was back at work in six or eight weeks. That was more challenging. Mike could be home part of the Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 13
time with her and with Mandy, but now I had to find someone to tend a little young one. His sister helped for a while. It was not the ideal situation; the care wasn’t what I was hoping to have. I found neighbors who wanted to be stay-at-home moms, but needed to supplement their income. They had the sort of values and exposure to the world that I was looking for. Didn’t take a lot; they just took my kids. They had kids about the same age, and it was great. It just worked out wonderfully, and that really helped me out especially when they were very young. Even as they grew, again we had neighbors that would take them after school and that helped out a lot as well. I do think it was hard for women. I was very lucky that we had daycare here at UVU and particularly with my youngest. It worked so well. It challenged her so much, which was good.
Wage discrepancy has multiple causes. One is bias that does exist. I still can remember a couple of opportunities even with people that I respected a lot who I thought would never say words like this, but did. Who would say, “I think so and so needs a raise because you know he’s trying to raise a family.” I would just be stunned thinking, what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to raise a family too. I have bills I’m trying to pay. I don’t work here because I’m trying to get out of the house. I’m working here to support a family too. Those things just cut me. I would think, Are you kidding me, or the man that would walk around who would say, “I cannot do this or I cannot do that.” I’m thinking, You have a wife she can get a job. This wife got a job. You can have those things. You can make different choices. If that is what you are going to whine about there is something you can do about it, so stop whining about it (laughs) so those sorts of things.
I never felt, as though there was intentional, mindful discrimination. It was that unconscious, Well he’s is trying to raise a family. He has six kids and a wife. He has a house payment to make. I’m thinking, what have I got? Hi, I’m a human being too, and we have the same issues. The other cause of wage discrepancy and I’m a guilty poster child is women will take on [additional] responsibilities without money. I did that through my career until the fall of 2008. That’s not that long ago. That is the first time I took on more responsibilities, got the title at the same time, and actually got the money at the same time.
Most of my promotions at the university did not work that way. When I first moved to the budget office, I was moved out of academic affairs with my boss of twenty-one years. We worked together for twenty-one years—
[40:26]
KW: Was that Lucille Stoddard?
LM: No, it was Doug Warner. He was my boss for twenty-one years. Lucille was my boss for a very short time, but is still my mentor and friend forever. He [Doug Warner] became director of budgets. Then it was a question of do I follow him to budgets or do I stay in academic affairs, which Lucille was over. The decision was made that I would follow him with budgets, but I would not get a pay increase, but he person who was going to move from that slot into academic affairs would, and I should just be okay with that, Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 14
which I was. Even being an assertive woman, somehow when it came to that, I just didn’t push it. As I advanced and had more and more responsibilities, I would tend to get a title and then maybe a year later I would get the raise. I got a title and a raise, more responsibilities, title, raise.
Bill [William] Sederburg when he became president, there were six vice-presidents then. He leaned his organization down to four. My boss Doug Warner was a vice-president. He was changed to an associate vice-president. I thought, Okay, I’m going to get pushed down the organization a little bit more because Doug reported to a vice-president reporting to the president. And I’d be reporting to the associate vice-president reporting to the vice-president reporting to the president. Okay we will see if I stay. That was sort of my attitude. We’ll see if I stay. (laughs) But within a couple of hours Bill Sederburg had called me in his office and said, “I want to pull budget out from under that, and I want you reporting directly to me.” Now I have a new title, I’m reporting directly to the president, and I’m told that I cannot give you any money. I said, “Okay.” And a year later he says, “All right find out what other people in positions like this get paid and give me a proposal on your salary.” I researched it and took him in the number and he said,” Okay but we’ll do it over two years.” I said, “Okay” even though I had all ready done it for a year. Is this his fault, no, not completely. It’s my fault because I didn’t say, “You know what? That is not the way I think it works.”
(The lights turn off, and there is discussion about that)
So I did that. In that particular situation, we had a HR director who was a woman who was a dear friend and colleague still to this day. We had our biggest argument we ever had because she didn’t feel like I should get that raise. It was phenomenal to me. It was a year later half at a time—so basically it took three years to get fully paid for what I was doing. I had to argue with a woman about this.
KW: There were a lot of women here at that time that were in leadership positions. Did you find that women were not supporting each other—that they were almost tearing each other down?
LM: Yes, and not only tearing each other down, tearing down the men. Somehow, to some extent in order for women to get ahead, we all had to tear down someone else. You asked about the axioms in one of your questions you had on the paper you sent me. One of the things I’ve used is “I lift thee and thee lift me and together we’ll ascend.” It’s an old Quaker proverb. The idea of climbing over top of people to get somewhere just doesn’t work because all you do is leave dead bodies behind or walking wounded. That is never healthy for you, for them, or for the organization. I didn’t like that. My last job change for responsibilities was under Interim President Liz Hitch. When we took and laid out that job, she actually not only gave me the responsibility and the title, she gave me money at the time. Then as I have proven myself in that job, I’ve received additional pay increases, which to me that is as it should be. This only occurred to me a couple of years ago. Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 15
I had attended a conference. I was in a session for women business officers talking about women’s issue. There was a young woman; she was probably about thirty. That was her big point at the table; women undersell themselves. She told the story of applying for a job at a private university. She was going into the interview with the president; she was a finalist. One of her colleagues asked her, “What are you are going to ask for in salary.” She said, “I don’t know. I don’t have any experience in higher ed. I was thinking 80,000.” Her colleague said, “You are not going to do that.” She pulled her into her office and said, “You are worth more than that. You are going to ask for 100,000 dollars.” “I don’t think I’m worth it.” “How do you know you are not worth it? If that is what the job is worth, ask for 100,000 dollars.” So she got her courage up and she sat across the table from this president who said, “How much were you thinking?” She said, “Well, I was thinking 100,000 dollars.” She said, “I just sat there thinking, he is going to run me out of the room. He sat in his chair for a minute and thought and he said, ‘Okay, you are hired.’” She has other women who she has told that story to. They will call her up before they go on a job interview and say, “Give me the talk. Give me the talk.” I wished I had had someone give me that talk because I think that’s what kept my salary down over time. I was not assertive or aggressive as men are; I just should have been.
KW: I see that in a lot of women. I don’t know why we undersell ourselves because we usually are the ones that do four times as much in our jobs.
LM: Right.
KW: What would you say has been the most difficult trial has been in your life, if you could share that?
LM: My difficult trial is really quick and easy for me to come to. I contemplated about it and said I was not going to cry about it today, and you didn’t know you did this. But you said those words and I thought, Yep, see it’s still there. I didn’t want two kids; I wanted more than that. I wanted at least four. We spent a couple of difficult years going to fertility doctors, treatments, blah-blah-blah, and testing trying to come up with a way to make more kids. Our second daughter is a gift from God. I think we had to go through all that to say, “She was your gift; stop knocking.” Sort of that realization of we are only going to get two kids. What you said that you didn’t know that you said, but became very painful during that time; it’s not painful anymore. People would say, Oh you just have two kids, and it was always just two. In Utah, two is a just. It always has a just in front of it. Anywhere else in the country people would say, You have two kids, but here just two. I had a great colleague at the time. She was the assistant attorney general who was assigned to UVU who helped me through this a lot. She had two boys, and I don’t know whether she wanted more or less. We would talk about this just statement a lot. It was during the same time—I’m LDS. It was at the same season that it felt like to me when everything was saying, Women go back home. Women your role is to raise children. Women this, women that—Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 16
KW: Is this during the Proclamation5—
LM: It was way before the Proclamation; it would have been like 1990 time frame. We were
living in a ward where people had humongous families.6 They seemed to kick out kids
any time they wanted. My husband had a sister who became pregnant out of wedlock,
and all the stories were on TV about cocaine babies. And you’re just like, “Please Lord
I’m here. My husband is educated now. We’re going to have a house; we have five
bedrooms. Why can’t we have kids?” It became very challenging, very straining on me,
very straining on him. It was very emotional.
KW: I’m sorry.
LM: Even to this day, I feel as though there are people who don’t know me who would look at
me and say, “Well, that is a career woman. This woman wanted a career. Look she only
had two children. Of course she wanted a career; there’s evidence right there. She only
had two children. She traded family for career.” I didn’t trade anything. I still in my heart
wanted a big family, big meaning four, which isn’t even big in Utah. We wanted more
kids desperately, but we couldn’t have them. There is still the sense even now when my
youngest is twenty-five. That I still feel like because people didn’t know me or know we
were going through that experience that say—even family members, who in their heads
think, They only had two kids because Linda wanted a career. I didn’t only have two
kids because I wanted a career. I could have had four kids and had a career.
KW: I didn’t grow up here, and I had fertility problems too—
LM: Usually when I talk to people, I find out that so many people do.
KW: Um-hm, wow, what an interesting concept to have to go through that.
[50:31]
LM: It was—it seemed every religious lesson I heard was about having more kids. It was very,
very heartbreaking to actually get to that point when you say, “We are really not going to
have any more kids, okay now what?” That’s the other axiom I have used my whole life,
and it started when I was very young. Well if I didn’t get that and, Heavenly Father, that
was such a great thing that I wanted, I had to take that into “now what?” I had a sister
who struggled her whole life with— when I get on the other side I’m going to ask him
why he did this to me. This was so painful to me. I just thought watching her; this is just
not healthy. I thought, You know what? You can’t do that in life. I can’t be, “Oh I have
5. Kimberly refers to "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" from the First
Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was issued in 1995.
6. A ward is the basic ecclesiastical unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 17
been treated so poorly.” “Oh, I just cannot have this so I’m going to be sad and upset my whole life about this.” “Or, I have to go to work.” And that’s how it felt initially. I have to go to work. I’m going to be mad about this. No, if this is what we have, now what?
By the time, I’m twenty-six, I’m done having children. That means by the time I’m forty I’m a mother-in-law. Part of what we have taken from that is, we struggled for a long time with school and being established as a family financially, but because of the timing of our children, we’re at this point now, I’m fifty-one, and my kids are raised. I’m saying “So now what?” You have given me these opportunities. How do I use this to bless others? What do you want me to do?
I have a dear friend who was a neighbor. I went to high school with him. When my oldest was graduating from high school, he had recently gotten married for the first time and had two of his kids. He was starting this path. I was near the end of my path. I have always laid that in perspective and thought there were things he was able to do when he was single and not with kids. That’s great. I didn’t do those. I have this different opportunity at the other end of my life. What has that got in store for me? It is sort of the “what now.”
KW: I look at you, and I think that the Lord needed a woman like you to come into this university because of your knowledge and the way that you could solve problems. You have been a great instrument here. I know when you want to have children that is—
LM: Right, it is portrayed off that—
KW: —hard. You probably have not seen the good that you have done for all these people that have gained an education here—
LM: Right.
KW: —and the programs that were able to be built here because of your great skills and taking care of the budget. I think what would the world be like if every woman stayed at home to raise children.
LM: Right, right. It wouldn’t be the same and so that’s part of the dilemma that I had with the whole women should go home; there were people quitting and going home. I really do say sincerely, it’s your decision. If that’s your decision and you can make that work, good on you. I have a sister-in-law who has done that her whole life, and it works for her. I don’t know if that would work for me. My oldest daughter, it works for her. My youngest daughter would love to be married, would love to have children and have a career. She is sort of like me: I can have it all kind of person. She doesn’t see herself just doing that; she really wants to push that expanse different ways. It is not just here at UVU that I think, If not this, then what? I have great relationships with my nephews and nieces, my siblings. I was able to take care of my mother in her final years, and the business sense, helped me take care of her estate. I could give that time to her because I didn’t have young kids and because I had older daughters. They were very helpful to me during that Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 18
time where other siblings were either older or far away or had young kids of their own and weren’t able to balance those things. I was able to balance that into my life. There are a lot of things. I’m sort of the family connector. Everyone in the family might not talk to each other, but they’ll talk to me. We plan the annual family party. I have nieces, nephews, and great-nieces and nephews that have me come to their volleyball games and stuff. To me that is part of the “if I can’t have this, now what” because something else will help me. I know it’s helping them, but it’s helping me. It is building me as well.
KW: Right, right.
LM: There’s something I was going to say about that. Oh, my oldest daughter had fertility problems. Her and her husband, they were married seven years before they had their first child. Watching her struggle through that one, she was working to help support him through school, and it’s not what she wanted to do. That was really hard. As he got closer to being done with school, they started into fertility testing again. She got pregnant and had her first one. Then she got pregnant with the second one. I know they are probably at that point that they are thinking, Are we going to have another one? I don’t know where they are at with that. But I know that at least because I have been through that I can say, “I understand where you have been, what this does, and what it takes.” I know how hard it is to deal with that because it’s a different feeling. I’m blessed to have two. I count it as a blessing, but it wasn’t what I had planned.
KW: I understand that. My third one was a huge surprise to me, and she’s been just an incredible blessing to me. I really understand that.
LM: In my immediate family, brothers and sisters, infertility is a problem. It is not like my brothers and sisters per se, but my oldest sister never had any and adopted two. The next sister had one and adopted one. My next brother, they had two and then they had fertility problems. They finally got three more including the last one was a total surprise. My next brother, their first one born very early and died. She had to go through a procedure to keep some. She had four more. I had two and then my next sister only had two. In our immediate family, we all get it. We all get the blessing of children because for none of us did this come easy. For none of us was it just, Yeah, yeah we will just go and do this. [In] my immediate family, it is valued. My husband’s family, I think they totally don’t get me. They totally don’t get this why we only had two. They don’t understand that, and I think that’s a challenge.
KW: Especially living here in Utah Valley, you go into a mall and everybody’s pregnant. That must have been very difficult for you and it is very hard. People just assume everybody can get pregnant, and they don’t have that problem. I fully understand.
LM: Yes.
KW: What advice would you like to give to Utah women today?
LM: Don’t underestimate yourself. Not just in career and education. Don’t underestimate theUtah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 19
good you can do in your home in your community. I haven’t just done stuff here. I was the president of a children’s choir that my kids were in. I took them to Washington DC. These kids got to have experiences that they wouldn’t have had.
I’m a firm believer in education. I’ve become converted to that. I’m first generation. My husband’s first generation. It’s very evident to us the difference it makes in your life. I don’t just mean financially it gives you better stuff. I mean civically, communications, problem-solving, situations you can keep yourself out of or get yourself into. Opportunities that abound all those ways. It just makes such a difference in your life and in your kids’ life. The ability to choose your working environment, your work situation, your hours. Those things are all there.
Don’t underestimate yourself, but do what feels right in your heart. If you are fighting against what feels right in your heart, man or woman, you are not going to be happy. We’re supposed to be happy. (laughs) That is some of the advice I would give.
Find good mentors, mentors who are sincere about you. Not mentors who want to say, I will be happy to be your mentor. People who really sincerely care about you.
In fact, they might not even know that you’re looking at them as a mentor. Learn from them. Learn everything you can about everything you can early on. You don’t know what opportunities will lie if you learn those things.
KW: I could not agree with you more. What would you like to be remembered for? That’s a huge question.
[01:00:29]
LM: Yeah. (laughs)
KW: How do you begin to answer that?
LM: That’s a good question. Sorry I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional about that. Um, Janette Hales Beckham is a woman that I just admire, like unbelievably admire. I knew her story, and I knew who she was. She was a General Young Women’s president of the Church.7 She had been a state legislator; she lost her husband. She’d remarried. Janette Hales Beckham was put on our board of trustees a long time ago. Long before I started regular interactions with trustees, I would watch her, and I remember watching her through the Michael Moore situation here at UVU. I just remember her wisdom. And she’d never get in a dither, just even and thoughtful. Her perspective was, I’m not going to get down in the grit of the situation. I’m up here and I’m going to think about this. Then when she said something, it would be profound. I still admire that about her. I still am amazed at how wise she is. I remember her talking at something—oh, we honored her a year ago at an event. They read her résumé. She got up and said, “I never wanted my
7. The Young Women is a youth organization in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 20
life to be remembered as a list.” That just stuck with me.
I don’t want my life to be remembered as a list. I don’t want my impact to be remembered as a list. I would like the impact to be remembered more in how I helped others. My demeanor, I want to be remembered for being positive, for being upbeat, for being happy, for having humor, for being bright, for being creative, but not for a single event or award or single title. Those are the list things. I want to be a friend. I want to be a colleague. I want to be trusted. I want to be a part of a team. I want to be known for someone who could take on a challenge successfully, someone who could navigate the environment, and reflect well on the rest of the team and the university.
In a personal sense, it’s that same way. The list doesn’t really matter. Maybe that’s the trade off part. I have two beautiful daughters. I have a husband I’ve been married to for thirty-two years who’s my best friend.
KW: Oh, and grandkids.
LM: I have two beautiful grandchildren. Oh, yes don’t even get me started on them. They are just adorable. I love them. I have great relationships with my siblings, and like I said, my nieces and nephews. I love them all. I want to be that fun-loving, creative, organized, keep-us-together sort of lady who is known for: She was successful, but she had a heart. She was successful, but she’d sit down and blow bubbles with the kids or do whatever it is that is fun. To me, be in the moment and just enjoy the journey along the way—those sort of strange things that you want to be known for, but it’s not a title. It’s not those sorts of accomplishment. It’s not the list. It’s, did people like working with me? Did they enjoy the interaction? Did I contribute? I don’t want to be known for detracting things. I want to be contributing things. Maybe someday someone would say she was a mentor. Maybe it will be somebody that just surprises me. That would be eerie, but awesome at the same time. I would hope that I could help people see that they can achieve things that they didn’t think they could. I like Eleanor Roosevelt’s quote, “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I like people who can do things.” I hope people would feel like I support people in doing things. That I’d be remembered for someone who does things, that can make things happen, but does it with people in mind and recognizing human beings all around.
KW: Not climbing over the top of someone.
LM: Not climbing over the top. That I lifted people, they lifted me, and together we all lifted each other. That was healthy; I want to be part of a healthy organization.
KW: It seems that people like Lucille and yourself that you were not climbing over the top of somebody else. You were there. You wanted a success of the whole organization—
LM: The whole organization, yes.
KW: —which you really see that. I told her that I have had such a pleasant experience coming Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 21
to school here. Being a nontraditional student, it’s just been the most enjoyable experience.
LM: You didn’t ask me about nontraditional students—
KW: Oh—
LM: —I have some thoughts on that.
KW: —okay.
LM: I was that; that was awkward. That was very awkward being a nontraditional student—
KW: It is terrifying—
LM: —it is terrifying, and I’d frequently go to people and I would say, “Folks, we have got to do more for evening non-traditional evening students because you don’t know what it is like to be them.” It’s not the same. You are in there with eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds who are preparing for the LSAT, and you’re thinking I will be happy just getting through this class. I’m trying to keep up with that. I have a husband to go home to and kids. I would always try to disappear in the back of the room. I don’t know if you did that. But I was this sort of—I think it was because I worked here. I worked here visibly. I didn’t work here somewhere nobody knew. I worked here in a visible position. In fact, as I was finishing my bachelor’s degree, my title was director of budgets. I’m thinking, Okay I’m director of budgets, and they’re going to figure out that I don’t have a degree. It was very unnerving to feel like I’m in a position in higher education where people are looking and saying, “You are really not qualified for that.” These faculty members are going to know the director of budget is in my class. Doesn’t she have a degree? It was very difficult. I would try to sit in the back of the class. Seriously, the first two class periods I would try to melt. Please don’t ask what we do; don’t do that. Partly, because I didn’t want the faculty member to feel awkward and I didn’t want the class members to feel awkward. I just wanted to be a student in the room and disappear in the crowd. It was kind of hard to do that here.
In my accounting classes, I also discovered a lot of the women did that. We sat in the back of the room even in the early 2000s, late nineties. In fact, one of my high school friends was in some of my accounting classes. We would sit by each other, and we would tend to be in the back of the room. I think part of it was we felt like, well the young kids are here to get the full experience. We are kind of the observers in the classroom. I don’t know why we felt that way, if it was our mothering instinct, if we thought this is really for them, but we are here and we are going to get the same stuff, but it’s really for them. It is very odd to go through my bachelor’s degree that way. Graduate school no, that was not a problem at all. In my undergrad that was very awkward to be this mother old enough to be the mother of some of these kids in a classroom and having a different relationship with faculty members then as colleagues being a student. That was very different.Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 22
KW: Were there a lot of nontraditional students here at that time because now I know now there are quite a few?
LM: There were quite a few at night, but there were still—I would take a morning class or I would take whatever and then I would be in with the typical students. Nontraditional, not so much. Again I think again I hung to the back. Part of the reason too was that some of the classes where I would be up front or in center—I took sociology of the family from Ron Hammond. I did sit more front and center, and he would pick on me a lot. I don’t mean rudely or anything. He’d call on me. I’m assertive, and I do like to speak up. I don’t like to waste time. I want to get moving. Because I was married and had been married over a decade at least at that point, what is your experience? I’m in the class, and I’m a student here. I love Ron; we are great friends and had a great relationship, and it was a good class, but was awkward to be this [example]. Well, she’s married and I guess she will tell us what it like. That’s what it is like for me, but I don’t know what it will be for you. I think maybe after that class I thought I’m just going to hang out the back of the class in a corner and maybe I won’t get called on as much. It just always felt awkward to me. I felt like sometimes they had to call on me because of my position or I’d feel bad. I’m thinking, Oh, don’t call on me; please call on them.
KW: That would be a very interesting experience because you did work here.
LM: It was awkward. I think one of the other influences to come back to school—the ward that we were living in at that time—there were three or four women whose kids were all now all in school. They decided they were all going to become nurses. I watched; they had Young Women’s president callings and stuff. I watched what they did to get through nursing studies here at UVU. It was phenomenal. They would have to lock themselves in closets to study and they would talk about that. I just thought, Wow, how are you doing this? I watched them do it, and I watched them succeed. I thought if they can do it, I can do it. They helped me, and they didn’t even know they were mentors, but they were mentors to me. I would watch them do that and I thought, If those ladies could get through that—they got through chemistry—I can get through this class.
KW: It’s tough, I know when I took my [college math] 1050 class, I did not learn this stuff in high school.
LM: I didn’t either in 1050, no.
KW: The kids that were in my class, they were familiar with it from high school. I thought they didn’t teach us that in high school. It was learning completely new things. I learned to hang out with eighteen-year-olds. They were my—
LM: That’s right and go to the tutoring lab—
KW: I did—Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 23
LM: —and you are thinking, Oh man, I’m in the tutoring lab. I’m how old and I’m in the tutoring lab.
KW: I was in there, and my study partner was eighteen years old. I knew her from my brother’s ward. She was the same age as one of my nieces—
LM: Yeah—
KW: —it was pretty funny. This school to me, you can definitely tell there have been some women that have been there in leadership positions that have—
LM: —helped to make it comfortable, acceptable.
KW: Yes, I have felt that. I’ve never felt uncomfortable—I mean the first day, I was terrified.
LM: Yes, and that is ourselves we are terrified—
KW: You think people are looking at you, and they’re not. They’re just—
LM: They are just as terrified as you are. Like the saying, Don’t worry what you look like on the beach because everyone is worried about what they are wearing and about what they look like. It’s the same sort of thing. That’s what we are thinking, that everyone is judging me and they’re not. They are sitting there thinking you are judging me.
In one of my accounting classes, I think she was in a couple, Becky Zabriskie, she was a young single mom. We would sit in the back of the room. She works here on campus now. She’s delightful. She is remarried, and she has had additional kids. I still just think, I remember sitting next to you, Becky, in accounting classes, and I loved it. To some extent, maybe it keeps me grounded. I may have a position, but I love that I would be just as comfortable hanging out with Becky as I’m sitting in the president’s cabinet. That is another story I’m going to tell you.
KW: It’s because we are all people, and that’s what we forget. You put all these titles on them and you put these clothes on them, but they are just people.
[01:14:00]
LM: Yes, they are just people. Okay I’m going to tell you a couple of quick feminism stories—
KW: Okay, I would love for you to do that.
LM: When I first moved from academic affairs into the president’s suite, we didn’t have any money. I’m sorry, but we just didn’t have money. My husband was going to school, and I had had both of my kids by that point. I shopped at Pykettes at that time. I don’t know if you know what Pykettes are, the polyester pants with the button-up shirts, and that’s what Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 24
we could afford. I was going upstairs, and at that time, the president’s secretary was scary. (laughs) She was the dress for success queen. Lucille’s secretary was not scary, she was very sweet, but she was also dressed for success. And here I’m thinking I cannot do it. I remember telling Barbra Hoge and still remember where we were when I said this, and she just broke out laughing. I said, “I don’t care what they say. I’m not going up there wearing colored pantyhose.” She burst out laughing because they were doing three-piece suits with the colored pantyhose. I’m thinking, I cannot do this. I have two young kids. I can’t afford a wardrobe. I don’t want that wardrobe anyway. It’s never been my thing. Dress for success was huge at the time. I thought, How am I ever going to fit in. I thought, Well, they had better take me as I’m. I’m not going to wear jeans. I’ll do the best I can, but that is all I have.
Within a few months of me moving up there, another dear friend who was a single mom at the time moved from the parking office into that suite as a secretary to a vice-president. She was worse off than I was. She clearly didn’t have money. She had four little kids. She was working to keep her kids and her family together. She had to wear jeans. She didn’t have anything else. I thought you know to some extent maybe I ground broke so that when that happened, she was not alone. She was someone I could bond with that said, “I cannot be them. They’re towards the end of career and they can do that; we cannot do that. We will do the best we can do.” That dress for success was a big deal.
In that same environment and I don’t want to name names, but this was an era of feminism and not total acceptance yet. Another dear friend was working for another colleague in the president’s suite. Her boss—and it was in those days when you pushed the phone and would say, “Linda, can you come in?” It was that kind of a thing—he would push the button and say, “Mrs. Reed, can you come into my office.” I would just bristle; she’s not Mrs. Reed when she is in this office. She is Joanne. It just irritated me. She’d just go in dutifully. I love Joanne, but she was very dutiful.
I don’t know what spawned this, but at the time this individual decided that it would be best if all of those on the president’s cabinet—I don’t know what we called it back then, the council—if their secretaries would refer to them always by the appropriate titles. I was to call my boss, Dr. Warner instead of Doug, and he would call me Mrs. Makin instead of Linda. Gosh, I thought, Are you kidding me? It just irritated me so much. They called us ladies in to a special president’s council meeting to discuss this. Picture this room and they’re in there, and Lucille was in there—love Lucille—the president and vice-presidents and us secretaries come in the room. This proposal comes on the table and I’m just wanting to (sound of wringing a neck) but I was patient. I thought, We will see what happens now. First of all, I’m thinking are you going to stick up for me, my boss or what. I’m thinking it is in your court. Dr. Wayne Kearney who is just a sweet, sweet man, he was the vice-president of student affairs, and he said, “I have never had a problem with these women referring to me inappropriately. I do not think this is necessary.” Lucille said something very similar and it died. I thought, Thank you so much because I could not imagine being called Mrs. Makin at work. I’m not Mrs. Makin—Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 25
[01:18:38]
KW: Sounds like you were going back to Leave it to Beaver—
LM: (laughs) Oh, it was so challenging. I just thought, Really you’re going to do this to us? How could you do this to us? I have one other story about the women doing to women. I have a dear friend, a colleague who was our HR director for a while—not the same one that I had the argument with but a different one—she had worked her way up through Geneva Steel. She was in the First Wave Feminism; she clearly was. That was her lens—the First Wave of feminism. She had started, it was a male dominated industry. At least higher ed. has not solely been dominated by men, but this was the steel industry. It was unions and that was a male-dominated industry. She had managed to have a very successful career [and] was very well respected not only at Geneva, but at US Steel. [She] had a great reputation. She had that First Wave Feminism, this is how women behave in the work place and this is how you climb a ladder and this is how you do things. I remember her one day as I was climbing the ladder I guess, saying to me, “Now, Linda” in this sort of motherly tone.
“Now, Linda, you need to be careful about who you go to break with because who you go to break with is who they’re going to associate you with. As you climb your career you need to make sure folks see you associating with the right people.” I thought, Are you kidding me. Like thank you for the advice, I’m going to go to break with whoever my friends are. For years break was like this standard thing, it was go grab three secretaries, and we wandered down and got a drink and came back together. I didn’t care. If I could not be seen with the people that were my friends, I didn’t want to be advanced. I wanted to have the opportunity to go on break with whomever I wanted to go with. That is another one of those women things and that wasn’t helpful. That may have been how you climbed the ladder, but it was not going to be how I was going to climb it.
KW: To look at it from her side, how sad that she would have to do that.
LM: Yes.
KW: How sad that she could not really truly just have friends because you have common interest, but she had to pick and choose so that she would be able to have a successful career. That is very sad.
LM: To maintain your same friendships. I know it’s challenging it is hard to have dear friends and now you are their supervisor. That’s challenging if you have to have crucial conversations, but we can do that and still maintain a friendship. Another Janette Hales Beckham and this one is just from this week. She said, “Women give up goals in exchange for a relationship; men give up relationships in exchange for a goal.” I’ve thought about that a lot, and I thought I’ve been trying to not give up either. Now I don’t know if I will be successful at that, but I think for either gender, for either side of that coin, we’d all be more successful if we would maintain relationships while seeking our goals and maintain our goals when getting into a relationship. Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 26
I can see what she is saying because I watched my youngest daughter start a new relationship with a young man that was not going to lead her down the path of her goals. Luckily, it ended. I thought, You are going to trade all this for that. Don’t do it. That was a dangerous relationship; it was not a healthy relationship. When she broke off that relationship and she could step back later and realize, I was really going to trade in all my goals for that.
What Janette said about that I thought that is going to stick with me for a long time. How do we as men or women whichever side we’re on how do we maintain relationships and goals at the same time? I think that is the balancing act of life.
KW: Um-hm, how do you be true to yourself, which I think for women that we are raised in a way that we weren’t supposed to—
LM: To do tradeoffs. I do do tradeoffs. I remember being on panels when my kids were younger with women who were very stressed about being in the workplace. They were stressed, How do you make this work? I said, “My kids eat Lucky Charms for dinner and I don’t care.” I don’t have to apologize to anyone. I don’t have to go home and make the dinner that my mother made. She was home all day. If my kids eat Ramen and Lucky Charms, they had a healthy lunch at school or the healthy lunch I packed, that’s my trade off. Why, because now I get to spend time with them instead of, I’m sorry, but mom has to cook you this whatever, no. Corndogs and tater tots, whatever. Those are the tradeoffs that I made in exchange for relationships.
[01:23:53]
KW: I think being a nontraditional student and coming back to school, that has been a lesson for me. I always worked and predominantly a single mom throughout my kids lives. I tried to balance and make sure that I cooked these great meals, had this clean house, and worked. Then coming to school [I think] who cares about the house? Who cares what they eat.
LM: I’ve struggled with the word balance. Balance is still sort of a trade off; one thing goes lower. It’s still sort of a trade off. One of the concepts that I still have not been able to fully express, but I will try again. I like the word harmony. If you think of an orchestra and maybe it’s not a good harmony there probably is another musical word if I knew music better. If you think of an orchestra playing a symphony and all the instruments are there, they can all be playing at the exact same time. But it might be the piccolo you hear this time, and it might be the violin you hear this time; it might be the drummer you hear this time, but they are all still there. They’re all still a part of who I am, but at this particular moment this part of me is getting louder and stronger than this part of me. When my kids were little, oh my gosh, I did crafts and creative stuff, and we did the fun holiday, and now you know what, that part of me is tucked away, and I will use it with grandkids, but it is not as important to me—other things—but they are still part of me. They are still in that harmony, and I didn’t have to remove it from the scale, I just toned itUtah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 27
down and made something come out stronger.
KW: That is really a great analogy, it really is.
LM: Balance is a trade off; harmony is also part of me. Someday maybe I will write that.
KW: Thank you. I really appreciate you agreeing to this. Just really appreciate having some of your insights.
LM: Are you open for one more?
KW: Oh, I would love that—
LM: I’ve been talking too much—
KW: —no, no I don’t know your time. I would love to sit and chat with you. I just don’t want to impose on you.
LM: Because you are a nontraditional student. You worked for how long?
KW: Gosh, ever since I was eighteen so—
LM: Okay.
KW: I worked in the beauty industry for twenty-five, twenty-six years. Then moved here five years ago, then started a new career, and then because of the economy, I was laid off my job.
LM: Okay, in higher ed. because that is the only industry I have ever worked in, degrees are currency; they are the ticket to ride. For so long of my career, I mean only in the last ten years, have I had a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t have a degree and I felt owned. Let me describe what I mean by owned. First of all, it’s a hidden secret; no one told anyone. It was like, if I can keep this secret, it is better. When I was working towards finishing my degree, I discovered that two other women in my position in the state also didn’t have bachelor’s degrees. We had never shared that with each other. We were so afraid that someone might find out about our secret, that somehow we were not qualified to do what we were doing. It felt like that.
The other thing I found out, I had a colleague; she is still a colleague, and she didn’t have a bachelor’s degree either. We would frequently talk about the frustration we felt over not having a degree, not feeling extremely supported to get our degree, in fact, sometimes feeling like they’re trying to keep us from getting our degree. Feeling the real sense that we are not mobile and they know it. They can overlook us, treat us badly, or whatever. Whatever injustice of the day we would blame on this. We coined the phrase, owned and owned is powerful word because what it means is “older women needing educational degrees.” Why did I want my degree, because I didn’t want to be owned anymore. I Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 28
wanted to be set free. When I had my bachelor’s degree, there was this sense of all right if I feel like I’m treated unjustly, I’m not owned anymore; I can go somewhere else. I like that phrase and I think for women who are nontraditional older women needing educational degrees—I know that’s how I felt. I very much felt like, they all know that I cannot go on anywhere because I won’t make it through first screening because I don’t have an educational degree.
KW: Isn’t that sad?
LM: It is sad, but I think of you now and you are going to have a degree. You are not going to be owned anymore. You are going to have opportunities that you didn’t have before you had your degree.
KW: For me personally, it’s given me such a sense of accomplishment. It’s also been such a great gift to communicate with my children—
LM: Yes.
KW: My oldest daughter came here. She didn’t have any support system because I was still up in Washington. She quit going to school and [now] she works for an attorney. When I originally came, I got my associate’s in paralegal studies—
LM: Oh, good.
KW: I started talking to her and saying, “You do everything that a paralegal does, but you are not getting paid a paralegal’s wage.” She has been coming back to school.
LM: Good, good for her.
KW: As a mother [I have found] education is so powerful to be able to help your children. My youngest is graduating this year and [I say], “You need to do this. We need to get you in here; let’s get you in that.
LM: They don’t always appreciate that we are now able to help them navigate. We had no one to help us navigate. We had to discover it for ourselves. They probably will take for granted or think, Stop it. I know what I can do. But we know where to navigate them.
KW: My youngest one I think she is really happy. My middle one, she will graduate here this spring.
LM: That’s great.
KW: She was the one who helped hold my hand a little bit along the way. You know, you need to fill out this out, Mom; you need to do this. Now she is just like the youngest one has had such a great opportunity. I’m like, but aren’t you happy for her. I did the best that I could do. Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 29
LM: That’s right.
KW: At least now, I can help her along the way.
LM: That’s true, so have you graduated or you will?
KW: It is funny when you are older and wiser. I was trying to graduate this spring. I was cramming everything in. I took a step back and there are all these opportunities of undergraduate writing to get things published; that’s my goal. I was in the business school getting my associate’s and I was not associated with humanities, which that’s where I’m at right now. I just thought, Why am I rushing to get this degree because I know what I want to do. I need to go on to graduate school.
LM: True.
KW: I might as well get all the education I can in undergraduate. I’m going to stay another year. I’m doing—
LM: The project.
KW: —the Women’s Walk, and I’m associated with Bill Cobb, and he has me working on his Vietnam Oral History Project.
LM: Oh, good.
KW: I’ve just got these great opportunities.
LM: Bill and Marilyn are awesome.
KW: He has been a great mentor for me.
LM: He is such a great guy.
KW: I’m doing that to market myself. I can take a class and learn how to write grants and that is a great skill.
LM: Yes, it is.
KW: So that’s kind of, what I’m doing.
LM: Good.
KW: I love it here.
LM: That’s good Utah Women’s Walk: Linda Makin 30
KW: I appreciate people like yourself who have given your time and your dedication in building such a great institution.
LM: Well, thank you.
KW: Thank you, I appreciate it.
[01:33:15]
End of interview